Reviews

“Anne Sandor’s At The Redemption Center invites us into the quiet reckonings of everyday life—where grace waits in grocery aisles, salvation hides in sidewalks, and memory redeems even our most fractured selves. Sandor reminds us that poetry is not just a mirror, but a lantern: illuminating the overlooked, the discarded, the sacred. These poems shimmer with hard-earned beauty and a truth that lingers like the light just before dusk.”

— Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of Homeland of My Body

William Carlos Williams said, “If it ain’t a pleasure it ain’t a poem.” There are 34 pleasures to savor in At the Redemption Center  by Anne Sandor, beginning with this one:

At the Redemption Center

At the redemption center

you bring the empty vessels,

the washed, the unwashed,

and sort them by kind.

Though all yield the same return,

the clean and the foul,

each rendered by what can be

burned or saved, purified or extracted,

you hope with each offering

for the redemption of us all.

 

Read this funny, serious, wise and wonderful book slowly, one pleasure at a time, while looking forward to the next collection of poetical pleasures by Ms. Sandor.

 

— J.R. Solonche, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee

Introduction to  "The Divorce of Happy and Ever After," What Boys Fear," "The Truth about Prodigals," and "Alchemy" for the literary journal 823 On High

 Anne Sandor is a poet who knows time, the gifts it brings and those it takes: how the love of custodial parents "remembers/ to leave a light on"; how boys fear death yet look for it everywhere, wearing a "brave face" and a mask in order to keep its force at bay.

 Through plain language and confident lines, Sandor's poems are tenderly truthful. How many parents have reached old age only to realize that the grown children who deserted them are the ones they long for most–the prodigals “squandering their good fortunes…what good looks they’d got”? How many adult children have relied on a dead mother’s cookbook so that cooking, “the very first chemistry,” could alchemize memory back to life?

 In poems of deceptive artfulness, Sandor's lines enjamb, unfold, and surprise. Their interest derives (in part) from a world where the idea of family is complicated, wounded with love and pain. They do not flinch from the daily obligations that race through our heads at night; they know that a boy’s “wary eyes” speak volumes he cannot voice.

 Though Sandor's poems may dream of homecomings that will never take place, the dreams themselves are hopeful. Perhaps this is because these are poems that radiate acceptance–a deep wisdom that has “everything to do with the senses”: the alchemy of art that ignites when vision and craft combine.

 Ned Balbo’s books include The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Prize), 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award), The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Donald Justice Prize and the Poets’ Prize), and Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Prize). His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship, four Maryland Arts Council grants, the Robert Frost Foundation Award, and the New York Encounter Poetry Prize. “The Wolves of Chernobyl” shared second prize in the UK’s 2022 Keats-Shelley competition and appears in Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity U. Press).  He has been a fellow or scholar at Sewanee, Bread Loaf, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where he was a 2021 Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow. He is married to poet and essayist Jane Satterfield. For more, visit https://nedbalbo.com.