$14.00
poems by
ISBN: 978-1-964277-70-7, 76 pages, $14 (+ shipping)
Release Date: March 26, 2026
The Advance Sale Discount price on this title has expired. For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $19/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
Sherry Siddall was born in Massachusetts, graduated from Oberlin College, and has lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina since 1975, where she raised a family. While she has written poetry for as long as she can remember, it is only within the last ten years that she has come to see herself as a poet, and to enjoy the fellowship and support of a large and talented poetry community. Her poetry has received awards from the North Carolina Poetry Society, and she has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Sweet Land, published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. Transformed and Singing is her first full length book.
Transformed and Singing, the apt title of Sherry Siddall’s wonderful new full-length collection, is the final line of her poem, “The Periodic Cicadas.” Renowned for their years of gestation underground only to emerge for a brief season of song, these creatures epitomize the poet who has achieved maturity and insight through a lifetime of deep love and loss. In this collection, Siddall shows that she has earned her wisdom. Her eloquent lyrics celebrate the natural world–excellent in itself. But not only that, for whether visiting a plantation in the Deep South or a memorial park in Hiroshima, Japan, Siddall’s astute vision reminds us of what connects all creatures, one to another. At the end of the day, what more can we ask of poetry? ~Maria Rouphail’s fourth poetry collection, This small house, this big sky, was published by Redhawk in 2025. In 2024 and 2025, she served as the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for central North Carolina.
The voice singing throughout Sherry Siddall’s Transformed and Singing is that of a woman with her eyes wide open and in love with the world. Siddall’s subjects range widely in subject matter—the natural world, celestial phenomenon, the cruelties of the powerful, love in long marriage, grief—but are unified by passionate attention to detail, nuance, and sound. And humor! “…spacial finger snapping, pulse / and pop, moved the aurora to lift its skirts” (“Aurora”). ~Joan Barasovska
The blue water moves relentlessly,
responding to wind and tide.
Common terns ride the air, drop
and dive to cut the water, grab
a shifting fish, and rise swiftly
back into the sky.
Imagine you are that fish, silver
and quick in your known world,
a water Eden with everything you need,
when you are suddenly snatched away
in the beak of a bird who would be
God, if fish had gods.
No water to breathe with gasping gills,
you see light differently when airborne
high above your sparkling home,
before becoming food for the tern,
down its gullet, bird energy
the next incarnation.
But if you are not a fish but a woman
who observes blue water and diving birds,
you lie nearly submerged in the shallows,
hopefully hidden from diving gods.
A woman breathing air, focused
on living, not yet transformed.
A nor’easter dabbles off the coast
raising the water to whiteness,
the wind to forgetting itself
in gusts and lurches.
Back canals are sober enough
for cormorants to lounge,
wings stretched in worship,
as deep cicadas drone in the cedars.
The tide escapes as it always does,
twice a day, responding to the
slippery Moon, pulling the blood
in flood time, neaps and springs.
Gravities align, Sun and Moon
dance out of habit,
their perfect mathematics
just enough to keep us here.
If you rise in the dark of December
on a clear night
the Geminids will astonish you.
Stars so far away seem safe to watch
as the moon waltzes in a different dress
every night, dances with the winter
meteors that sprint across the sky
like something alive, so many that
it’s almost like a party up there.
It’s impossible to tire of
their bright finality, flaming out
in the cold wheeling blackness.
A few tease at the corner of sight
no matter where you look
until a bright one burns up as if
just for you, arriving in your brain
like a new thought, or the revelation
of an ancient secret.
It’s best not to watch alone because
it can be hard, that minute when
you understand the lovely stars
do not love. That gift is ours,
the loving occupying space between
the dark matter of meteors and flesh.