Alert to Glory

Sound the trumpets! Sally Ito’'s Alert to Glory is a clarion call to “alertness and watching which is the poet’s/ constant state.” These well-crafted poems arouse in us a love of the natural world as well as the everyday domestic amazements.

Ito “face-praises” us into the world in its rich particularities. The old patriarchal God emerges as God the Peace—King, “God, the peashooter, the honey hurler of joy.” Behold, she makes old things —new wineskins for new wine.

These are peace poems for our contemporary world. Alert to Glory is a transformative book both salt and sweet.

Susan McCaslin, author of Demeter Goes Skydiving

Alert to Glory shows us in poem after poem the subtle, fluent essence of the sacred, how it can heighten every thought and gesture. These poems aren’t just beautifully rendered, but have the capacity to enhance our awareness of those intangible, spiritual dimensions of our lives. I’ve always admired Ms. Ito’'s poetry, but this book is nothing less than a call and invocation to our deeper natures. No easy task and harder still to do it with such elegance

Don Domanski

Ito's poems pull – thematically, imagistically, rhetorically – toward two poles: the hereafter, and the unblemished, cherubic spirit of childhood...There are glorious moments throughout this collection.

Quill and Quire

This is a collection that calls us to attentiveness, and practices it. The words often pile up, deep and thick with thought, and arresting in their images.

Dora Dueck, Borrowing Bones Blog

With joyous language, Alert to Glory opens the reader’s eyes to the “[o]rdinary awe [that] compels as suddenly as it recedes/ —a wave that enters, sweeps away, sometimes returns. Sally Ito's Alert to Glory is a "collection worth reading for its attentiveness to spiritual mysteries and to the seam between the visible and invisible, between impermanence and permanence.

Mariianne Mays, Herizons