Winner of the 2012 Award of Merit for the Canadian Christian Writing Awards
Whether the focus is on parenting, biblical texts, or on creativity itself, Ito discerns the moment in which the word might become wondrous—moments when the mind-bell is struck dumb, and the hollow fills with shuddering sound, agog with itself. Ito’s images ring with profundity in clear, fearless language that seeks to connect the reader with the soul’s capacity to sense the divine through gifts of awareness and wonder.
Advanced Praise
Sound the trumpets! Sally Ito's Alert to Glory is a clarion call to alertness and watching which is the poets/ 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 arent just beautifully rendered, but have the capacity to enhance our awareness of those intangible, spiritual dimensions of our lives. Ive 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
Reviews
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 readers 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
Awards
Winner of the 2012 Award of Merit for the Canadian Christian Writing Awards
Short-listed for the 2012 Manuela Dias Book Design of the Year Award
Short-listed for the 2012 Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher
Turnstone Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Government of Canada, and the Province of Manitoba through Manitoba Sport, Culture and Heritage.