Emerging author Sharon Woodward Jacobson’s From the Heart: Prose and Poetry reaches its best when she turns out unusual twists of phrase or reveals unique or complex aspects of her story. The book combines poetry, prose, and a cartoon, and reveals a thoughtful soul who, together with her close and supportive family, faces questions with no easy answers.

Her “Tribute to Grandfather” describes her memory of the man who raised her: ‘Into the past my mind wanders/like rolling waves dancing through thunder.’ The mixed metaphor conveys a sense of strength which is powerful, frightening, yet at once fluid and adaptable. In prose we learn of a grandfather who constantly taunted Sharon, born with cerebral palsy and to a mother who died of a heart attack during labor, that she would never amount to anything and who made her run up a hill near their country home while he followed in his Ford.

Later in life Sharon relates how she realized her grandparents had attempted to give her a reason to fight, to learn to walk, to get mad enough to prove them wrong and overcome the obstacles in her path. And she now walks, has a book of published writing, plays the piano, and is a proud wife and mother of a young son.
Sharon’s writing seems simple at first glance, but in fact communicates much through the declarative, startling rhythm uncovered by reading out loud and breaking at the end of logical sentences. She does not normally include punctuation, lending a sense of incompleteness. This is a collection of hopes, wishes, affirmations – concepts Sharon believes in and wishes to stand by even when darkness obscures her sense of hope. It could add to Sharon’s artistic repertoire to experiment with free verse, as in her prose she seems more uniquely thoughtful and less bound to form.
Learned from a Christian grandmother who taught her to play hymns on the piano, faith has shaped Sharon’s life since early childhood. Her self-identified spiritual pieces contain some of the strongest, tightest writing in the entire collection, celebrating God as a creative force throughout the natural world and as an artist using her own life as raw material. She finds this understanding affirming, not in a condescending sense but as a rationale for self-respect, that her life has the potential for beauty and dignity if she makes the most out of it.
From the Heart reveals and conveys dignity through its steady, strident tone, set by the first story about the grandfather who confronted her at an early age with life’s uncomfortable lessons and continued by the repeated marching rhythm and rhyme. Jacobson wastes no space in this short volume on melodrama or self-pity, getting down to what matters most: not cerebral palsy or suffering, but love, faith, and family.