The Weight of One Hummingbird Feather

"Sharon SingingMoon's new poetry collection, The Weight of One Hummingbird Feather is a tragic memoir of the loss of her son to drug addiction in early January 2023. These raw and honest poems reveal not just her son's descent into addiction but also his healthy years of promise. Imagine a mother's pain witnessing her son's hopes and potential disintegrate overtime because of amphetamine, methamphetamine, and fentanyl use, which finally claimed his life. Imagine the pain his 8-year-old daughter felt when she found the body of her beloved daddy. The poems are powerful, raw and emotional. One cannot read them without empathy and compassion. SingingMoon not only shares her grief but also wants readers to learn about street drugs, such as fentanyl, which are taking countless lives today. She was helpless, unable to change her son's choices. Sharing the intimate details of the path his life took and her forever grief over the loss of her son takes courage. SingingMoon is a skilled poet, and I believe many parents will relate to these impactful poems."
-Barbara Harris Leonhard, Three-Penny Memories, A Poetic Memoir.
"The best way to review Sharon SingingMoon's book, The Weight of One Hummingbird Feather, is by using her own words. Addiction, she states, "calls the tunes," and leaves loved ones behind with the "maybes" knowing full well that the deceased "was more/than the addiction that took him." In the end, she concludes that "hope clings/to frozen branches." Poignancy is learned experientially, sadly."
-Nancy Jo Allen, Wrinkles in Time and in Love and Wild and Tame.
¿¿¿¿"The Weight of One Hummingbird Feather is a dare, an ache, a catalog of grief. As I read Sharon SingingMoon's new collection, I felt a growing sorrow. The poems travel a parent's hopes for her son, his decades of drug abuse, her own what-ifs, and his overdose death. With honesty and restraint, SingingMoon describes the difficulties yet never lets us forget her son's personhood, sharing his childhood antics, his love for his daughter, the photos that "document the moments he tried." As a parent and a poet, I'm astonished at the way SingingMoon balances emotional events and terse diction-an incredible feat that allows the rest of us to experience the intense dynamics and not pull away. "I save my tears for after you leave," she writes, words for her son and for us too, brief companions in one mother's journey."
-Lynne Jensen Lampe, Talk Smack to a Hurricane
¿¿¿"I haven't been hit so hard by a series of poems in years. The first time I heard Sharon SingingMoon read from this collection I had tears in my eyes-for the experience they describe, for the poems themselves, and for Sharon's willingness to stand up and testify and help others see they aren't alone. What an important collection this is!"
-Justin Hamm, author of Drinking Guinness With the Dead: Poems 2007-2021