Sight Lines

by Sandra Marchetti

In this stunning chapbook, Sandra Marchetti not only weaves together poetry and essay, but she shows us that every poem is an act of deconstruction, a dialogue with the vast literary terrain that we have inherited. Although Sight Lines begins with a spare lyric prose passage in response to work by Annie Dillard, as well as various experiments in the visual arts, the selection of poems that follows proves just as erudite and incisive. Marchetti offers us poetry that is as much of a conversation as the best critical essays, placing received forms in dialogue with recent ecocriticism and truly postmodern approaches to narrative. This is a beautifully crafted collection by one of contemporary literature’s rising stars.

—Kristina Marie Darling, author of Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories 2007-2014

Sandra Marchetti’s Sight Lines reminds me of the joy I found when I first stumbled upon Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And that kind of reminder, of course, is a gift. I love the way the prose and poetry in this work intertwine, tangle, bleed together in the richest of colors, creating a single refrain. This is a book for the open air, a book about presence, a tribute to the fact that galaxies are expanding everywhere, at all times. This collection makes me want to go seeking, to find myself amazed in a “forest freshed with song.”

—Christopher Martin, author of This Gladdening Light, Everything Turns Away, and Marcescence

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published June 27, 2016

About the author

Sandra Marchetti is the author of Confluence, a debut full-length collection of poetry from Sundress Publications. Eating Dog Press also published an illustrated edition of her essays and poetry, A Detail in the Landscape, and her first volume, The Canopy, won Midwest Writing Center’s Mississippi Valley Chapbook Contest. Sandy won Second Prize in Prick of the Spindle’s 2014 Poetry Open and was a finalist for Gulf Coast’s Poetry Prize. Her poetry and prose appears in Blackbird, The Journal, Subtropics, The Hollins Critic, Sugar House Review, Mid-American Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, South Dakota Review, Appalachian Heritage, Southwest Review, Phoebe, and elsewhere. Sandy is a teacher and freelance manuscript editor who lives and writes outside of Chicago.