The duality of Columbus poet Amy Turn Sharp

In more recent years, poetry has taken two distinctly different forms for Amy Turn Sharp.

On one end of the spectrum are the shorter, more inspirational lines that tend to arrive quickly and fill her Instagram page, serving as sunbeams filtered through storm-clouded skies. “I know people are like, ‘Oh, Amy, she’s so positive and light,’ and that’s certainly a part of me,” said Turn Sharp, who will read alongside Dionne Custer Edwards as part of the ongoing “Rhapsody & Refrain” poetry series at Streetlight Guild at 5 p.m. on Sunday, April 27. “I think the way that I interact with poetry now more than ever is that I like to give it away and make other people feel good. If I as an Everyman-kind-of-writer can make someone else feel good and positive and light, then it makes me feel better.”

In recent times, Turn Sharp has more ferociously guarded these parts of her that tend toward joy, refusing to let the people intent on dragging us backwards pull her with them. “I was talking to my friend, poet extraordinaire Maggie Smith, and she was like, ‘They’re not gonna take our joy,’” Turn Sharp said. “I’m gonna give it forever, and I’m gonna try and be inspiring forever, even if I’m a little beat down, even if I’m a little weary.”

But there also exists within Turn Sharp a lesser-seen poet who for the last half-dozen years has been working on a continuously evolving collection of verses informed by everything from the grief she experienced in the wake of her mother’s death to the lessons she has gleaned from therapy, which has helped the writer to view the path taken with more grace than she might have afforded herself previously.

“I think seven years ago I was depressed. … I was worried about turning 50, and I was upset that I couldn’t get things together,” said Turn Sharp, who at the time started a collection of poems she initially believed to be about grief, but which have since morphed into something she described as richer and more fully rounded. “As I look at it now, it’s really a collection about love. But it’s also about being who you are supposed to be no matter what else is going on in your life, almost like an older person’s coming-of-age situation.

“So, really, there are two Amys. One is the wild spirit throwing things online, where I want you to see my stuff and feel good. … But then there’s also this other part of me that wants you to read a poem and have it mean something to you that’s a little bit bigger than what can live on Instagram.”

From an early age, words served as a place of imagination, refuge and companionship for Turn Sharp, who was raised deep in the Appalachian foothills outside of Hocking Hills, Ohio. And even as a child, the library inspired in her an innate sense of wonder, owing both to its physical size (the building dwarfed the family’s small home) and to the expansive galaxy of ideas and perspectives housed within – the bulk of which didn’t exist at arm’s length in the writer’s heavily white and conservative hometown. “It could be a hard place to be when you think differently,” she said. “And reading all of this stuff helped me to figure out, what do I think? What do I believe in?”

While writing has taken myriad forms for Turn Sharp since she first picked up a pen at age 10, her deep love for poetry has served as an ever-present backbone, even shaping how she approaches language in her recently started first novel. The writer traced this in part to what she described as “the pause” made possible by the form, recalling how as a younger person she encountered the Margaret Atwood poem “Variation on the Word Sleep,” and how it stopped her dead in her tracks as she read it on the streets of Logan, Ohio.

“I distinctly remember reading it and being like, first of all, I don’t even know what love is. I mean, I have this boyfriend I don’t even like. But I want to know what love is,” Turn Sharp said. “But most of all I just remember having that moment that every writer wants. They want to stop somebody, I want to stop somebody, from all this swirl and all this shit where it’s like, ‘Let’s just be together for a moment in time with words. Let’s feel that interconnectedness. Let’s feel something together.’ And it’s so, so beautiful.”

Despite her long history with poetry, Turn Sharp has released relatively little work in print to this point. A chapbook centered on motherhood and released a decade ago is now out of print, and the only other surfaced writings exist solely in zine form (the latest, dubbed “Instructions for Screaming,” releases this month). This could be changing in the near future, though, with the writer eyeing the verses amassed over the last six years for a potential poetry book, in addition to her in-progress novel, which she said will remain a primary focus through the summer months. It’s all part of an ongoing midlife transition, during which Turn Sharp helped confound the Franklinton art space Secret Studio, fell in love, and most recently began to navigate an unanticipated job loss that briefly left her unmoored but also instilled in her a renewed sense of possibility.

“I might be changing my life in a way where it looks different than it has for a long time, but it might make me more joyful, you know, diving headfirst into this artist life,” said Turn Sharp, who intends to read some of poems that arrived in the wake of her mom’s passing when she takes the mic at Streetlight Guild, describing it as a terrifying but necessary proposition. “I’m going to bring some new things and just be brave. … There are so many different things that have happened to me – losing my mother and my journey with grief and therapy. … But I’m getting older, and I think something in my life has been pointing me to even go a little deeper and a little bit wider with my art. And to not be afraid.”