Love or Fame; and Other Poems

Here we have late Victorian poetry that speaks across time to anyone who has ever stood at the edge of their own life and wondered which way to step. Through the character of Hilda, a young woman glimpsed in the collection's opening poem "Girlhood", Sherrick captures that liminal moment when youth's innocence meets the first stirrings of adult ambition. The ocean breathes in the background, nature offers its quiet consolations, but Hilda's gaze keeps turning toward something she cannot name: fame, meaning, a life that matters beyond the simple and the serene. These poems trace her internal struggle between love and recognition, between the peaceful present and the beckoning future. Sherrick writes with genuine emotional urgency about what it means to want more than what you have, to feel the weight of aspirations before you have the words for them. The collection endures because its central tension, how to live, what to choose, who to become, never resolves. It's for readers who love Victorian American poetry, for anyone drawn to quiet books about restlessness, for those who want to hear a woman's voice from 1880 wrestling with questions we still ask.