Some boldly, some timidly, the women in Bar Beach Diary take stock of their lives, then break the rules, exposing themselves to unfamiliar settings that challenge them further. Adventures may turn into misadventures, but potential is unleashed. Lives are changed. Sharpe performs magic here. She gives us a witty, stylish collection with plenty of heart, too. A disillusioned young diplomat finds solace on Bar Beach, which turns out to be more dangerous and more seductive than her embassy colleagues imagine. A visiting scholar is kidnapped by rebels in West Bengal. A purse snatching in Seville turns a honeymoon into a nightmare. Transgressive love promises liberation to a Javanese who may be tripped up by her own mortality. Nigeria's vibrant culture tests a successful diplomat's complacency. Hiking in Ladakh taxes a trekker's body and ego, but quitting has its own compensations. A weird baptism in wintery Soviet Moscow ignites repressed creativity. These are rousing good tales in which things are never as simple as they look and certainty is never the case. What Sharpe has done here is to perform a bit of magic: reader-friendly stories proving that post-modernism doesn't have to be obscure or snooty.

Buoyed by dry humor and compassion, these poems expose readers to a wrenching spectrum of human emotion and experience, not as recollected, but caught in the act, thus revealing poetry's power to penetrate, illuminate and hearten.

Reality-based yet meditative, immediately appealing surfaces reveal surprising depths in "The Danger is Seduction" work like a kaleidoscope. Time passes. Locales change. Faces come and go. The familiar becomes strange. Strange things become familiar. But constants evolve: a search for understanding, the balm of sympathy, a subversive humor. Pat Sharpe takes us with her as she ranges the world, seeking adventure and insight from Thimpu to Timbuktu, from Darjeeling to Moscow to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In this collection she introduces potters, tea pickers, lamas, a Mexican maid with a wrenching decision to make, elusive mothers and lovers, scuba divers, demon-chasing dogs, neighbors seeking a harmonious way to co-exist. She has us riding ferris wheels, flying over Las Vegas, trekking in the rain, selling haunted old furniture, scuffing through dry leaves, sitting in meditation halls, encountering tsunami damage and, always - a unifying theme - seeking with her a home in the world, a place that satisfies intellectually and emotionally as well as physically. These are layered poems, deep poems, lyrical poems, but they start from where we are and Sharpe has an uncanny ability to speak to us vividly in our own idiom. There is mystery here, but no mystification. There is clear-sighted realism here but its companion is compassion.

The Baraka poems are sensuous and lyrical, but they also depict real life, especially for women, in worlds where the religious-minded look to a patriarchal past for inspiration and so, naturally, these poems are about men, too, their pride, their privileges. The explicit local is Pakistan, above all, the sprawling port city of Karachi and its neighboring provinces. Sharpe asks us to confront zoom-by murders and honor killings while also bringing us the consolations offered at Sufi shrines: relief, hope, even joy. We visit the mountains, picnic on the beach and journey to Baluchistan where unseen women produce sumptuous feasts for their domineering menfolk. Sensuous but keen-eyed, these poems create a world that's all too real and relevant to all in our interconnected world. Baraka: The Indus Valley Poesms could have been written by a Pakistani....who loved this lande and grieved for it. In these poems Karachi comes alive -Fahmida Riaz, Four Walls and a Black Veil Sharpe slips behind the veils, the screens, the walls, the gates that keep much of Pakistani life out of view and mysterious. She refuses to ignore the sorrows, but her kaleidoscope is rich and beautiful. Baraka lures us in, and then gives us a harsh slap of reality. -Michael Hamilton Morgan, Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists