Review by Mary Makofske
From the title poem, “At the Redemption Center,” where the prosaic recycling of bottles and cans slides into “hope…for the redemption of us all,” Anne Sandor demonstrates her skill at turning words and situations over to examine their various facets.
Moving easily through family relationships, gender norms, and the inner lives of children and adults, this debut poetry collection also brings precise language and empathy to examine public events. Sandor, more a poet of the “eye” than the “I,” prefers to fade into the background as she lets images, metaphors, and events speak for themselves.
As daughter, mother, and grandmother, she is entwined in a rich family life which includes insight into gender expectations. In “What Boys Fear,” Sandor watches her first grade grandson and his friends decide being male requires being “mean” or scary, so at Halloween, he becomes the Grim Reaper to “carry the scythe, develop a thick skin / that will carry him through this world…”
Girls, on the other hand, are often constrained, as in the poem “There’s Always a Girl in the Box,” in which fairy tales and magicians play the heavies, until the final magic, when a girl confidently slithers down into a box to vanish from all restraints. In “Motown,” “six Irish girls from Brooklyn” lip-synch and dance to songs by the Supremes as they imagine how their own hearts will break.
In the lovely poem “A Balancing Act,” Sandor finds the metaphoric meaning in what looks like a parlor trick as her son, adept at juggling, tries to balance his toddler daughter on his palm,
one arm tucked behind his back,
the other cocked like a waiter’s,
the better to serve up his sweet girl
in her flowery new dress.
But the balancing does work:
…the moment
he stops the slight bob and weave,
counterpoint to her sway, as she responds,
grows still, arms outstretched, the two
perfectly aligned, here is a trust you hope
keeps them steady all their lives.
The poet’s mother, traditional in many ways, is praised in “Mirror Writing” for an unexpected talent, writing with both hands in different directions,
shimmying further apart
in syncopated coordination
like Rogers and Astaire drifting
across a ballroom floor.
Concise language and wit are central to this poet’s repertoire, but “I Talk Too Much,” can seem too extended. Whether this is meant to illustrate the title or not is for the reader to decide.
When Sandor’s view expands beyond the domestic, she handles controversial subjects deftly, without preaching or sentimentality. In “The Perspective from Blue Bridge,” she juxtaposes factual definitions with the killing of a young Black man, Tyre D. Nichols, who was photographing a bridge when accosted by police.
He is now the subject,
dragged from his car,
face down on the ground…
[as]
the third eye mounted
on the officer’s chest
records without consideration
for composition,
or any consideration at all.
As in the poem above, what is wished for often collides with reality. Though death row inmates can choose their meal for the “The Last Supper,” there is
no way to tell whether that last meal satisfied,
whether someone washed your feet, forgave you,
that others felt better having first fed you, joined you
for that last meal, then walked you down the long hall.
Likewise, in “Detritus at the Mexican Border,” what immigrants abandon as they cross the desert reveals what hopes they have abandoned about the new lives they seek.
Despite her darker poems, Sandor finds hope, especially in the diplomacy of food. “A Tale of Two Felafels” considers the effect of two restaurants, one Arab and one Israeli, which exist side-by-side in New York City:
How much sweeter it is to sit together
at a table laden with food, no matter whose,
than at tables with translators and
peacekeepers, negotiators and troublemakers.
Let us argue all day about whose teta or safta
made the best hummus, whose sweets are sweeter.
Better to wave broken bits of bread at one another
to exclaim our differences and then savor them.
Three of the poems in this collection won awards. “Ossuaries” and “The Perspective From Blue Bridge,”” were finalists in the New Millennium Awards, and “Mirror Writing,” received an honorable mention in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards (Paterson Literary Review). Though this is a debut book published only after her retirement, it’s clear Sandor is an accomplished poet. At the Redemption Center embraces the rich complexity of private and public life, a book to savor.
At the Redemption Center by Anne Sandor
Kelsay, 2025 $20
ISBN: 9781639808175 51 pages
Mary Makofske is the author of six books of poetry, most recently No Angels (Kelsay, 2023); The Gambler’s Daughter (The Orchard Street Press, 2022); World Enough, and Time (Kelsay, 2017); and Traction (Ashland Poetry, 2011), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize. Her poems have appeared in 77 journals and in 23 anthologies.. Her prose has appeared in the anthology Crossing the Line (Main Street Rag, 2015) and in About Place, Calyx, Iris, and Rockhurst Review.