Review by Suzette Bishop
In Dear Letters in the Red Box by Sarah Stern, her fourth poetry book, poems lift off from story, memory, dream, everyday experiences, and a deceivingly plain-spoken language, shapeshifting into something ethereal. Reading through a box of her mother’s papers after her passing spurs Stern to ruminate on what was given to her. Among those gifts she shares with the reader are family stories of endurance, Jewish ancestry, New York City, and how to live intentionally and deeply “in a strange factory of trees and words” (54).
Her mother’s poems and love letters between her parents are among the papers. Stern seamlessly interweaves a daughter’s pondering about her mother’s inner life and past with her own present life. She parses out how she is similar and different from her mother, their relationship, what she now understands about her in middle age, and what remains mysterious, this act like a dream where she “stood in a long dress, / took a deep breath, and started to speak / / about the story we don’t know” (43).
In some poems, the speaker attempts to trace her mother and other family members’ lives in Germany during the Holocaust. The red box requires it since it holds her mother’s German passport:
Her German passport with the large
J on it
Her eyes—pale blue
The gray trees of winter and that silver blue before sunset
She’s in the blue diminishing
The horror of J rides through me (47)
While her mother escapes Germany, the collection implies a question about the costs of moving to another country, being an immigrant, marriage, and raising children. Like the passport, there are a few glimpses of what it was like, but gaps loom large like the extra space before “J on it.” In “Counting,” her mother once told her, “It was all worth it because of you.” At the time, the speaker didn’t want to know what “it” was, which she felt was “too big, like a tarp” (76). Now, she realizes she wants to know. By the end of her life, powerfully depicted in the poem, “Her Clip-Ons,” her mother poignantly says she has had “enough” when her daughter asks if she might keep living for her sake (28).
The romance between her parents blossomed in Paris, but New York City is apparently where they met and settled and where Stern resides, richly grounding the speaker and the book. There are poems about travel, but home is New York for the speaker, perhaps one of the greatest gifts, the place her mother emigrated to. It’s presented as a humble, memory-filled home, making it relatable to readers both from New York City and elsewhere. The collection lovingly delivers only fresh imagery to put us in the city and its symbolic seasons, “The trees, their trunks gray / whales, call in the slow wind, reminding me // of the winters we were together” (51).
Traversing the city, Stern feels her mother’s presence, “I want to meet you now, years gone already, tell you things. I / wouldn’t know where to start. So busy, you’d say. I had no idea, / when you died, how much you’d still be there with me, lurking” (83). Her mother is the goldfish in the park and among people carrying bags of apples on the train. She wonders if menopause was the same for her, “Did everything go day-glo for you? / Did the colors of things become the things themselves?” (83). Significantly, she recognizes her mother’s experiences foreshadow her own trajectory as a woman and mother, working like our shadow, “its long lines that move ahead of us” (24).
Her mother’s ability to live with a fierceness haunts the speaker as she admits she can’t let go in the same way. The red color of the box, motifs, and the cover of the book, Matisse’s The Red Studio, mirror her mother’s fiery spirit, capable of abandon. The speaker once asked her:
How do we let our bodies dance?
Like this, she said.
We don’t let anything—it happens—
the swing of it, in the middle. (24)
The speaker thinks, “I wish I could let go, not realize I’m moving, / like water, it knows nothing of itself” (24). Shimmering, poems in Dear Letters in the Red Box attain this “fiery freedom” (23). Opening the lid, soulful revelations and questions escape, pirouette above the box before soaring off. Released from a red book, the poems like “The dark trees / Fly by” (26).
Dear Letters in the Red Box by Sarah Stern
Kelsay Books, 2026, 102 pages, $23 paperback,
ISBN: 9781639808342
Suzette Bishop has published three poetry books and five chapbooks, most recently, Were-Jag. Her writing has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, including Heavy Feather Review, The Writing Disorder, Literary Mama, and won or been a finalist in several contests.