Alert to Glory

Alert to Glory

$17.00
ISBN: 9780888013798

Plunging deep into the soul, Sally Ito renders a spiritual examination like no other in her new poetry collection, Alert to Glory. With this cohesive meditation of creativity, motherhood and poetry, Ito discerns spiritual gifts in daily acts of raising children and writing. Her images tie in to profound moments with clear, fearless language: a clematis vine ceases to exist when the speaker is distracted by a poem – her first child. “I’m the poem, he says./Look at me!” Children’s teeth falling out, the endless exhaustion of mother’s work, and the sight of an old baby carriage connect to deeper insights.

Awards and Honours
  • Shortlisted: Manuela Dias Book Design of the Year Award
  • Shortlisted: Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher
  • Commended: Canadian Christian Writing Awards

Praise
  • 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
  • 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—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

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 reader's eyes to the [o]rdinary awe [that] compels as suddenly as it recedes/ a wave that enters, sweeps away, sometimes returns. —Poetry Snapshot: Alert to Glory
  • 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." —Herizons

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206-100 Arthur Street

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

R3B 1H3

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