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Poetry Canadian

Alert to Glory

by (author) Sally Ito

Publisher
Turnstone Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2011
Category
Canadian, Spirituality
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780888013798
    Publish Date
    Sep 2011
    List Price
    $17
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780888015310
    Publish Date
    Sep 2011
    List Price
    $11.99

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Description

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.

About the author

Sally Ito was born in Taber, Alberta and grew up in Edmonton and the Northwest Territories. She studied at the University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta, and travelled on scholarship to Japan, where she translated Japanese poetry. Her first book of poems, Frogs in the Rain Barrel (Nightwood, 1995) was runner-up for the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award. Her second book, Floating Shore (Mercury Press), won the Writers Guild of Alberta Book Award for short fiction, and was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Prize and the City of Edmonton Book Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous periodicals such as Grain, Matrix and the Capilano Review and in the anthologies Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets and Poets 88. Ito lives in Edmonton with her husband and son.

Sally Ito's profile page

Awards

  • Short-listed, Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher
  • Short-listed, Manuela Dias Book Design of the Year Award
  • Commended, Canadian Christian Writing Awards

Editorial Reviews

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

back cover Susan McCaslin

"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

Dora Dueck, Borrowing Bones Blog

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 Fall 2012

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

Quill and Quire

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

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

back cover Don Domanski

Other titles by

Wonder-Work

Selected Sonnets of Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg

original author Catharina Regina Greiffenberg
translated by Joanne Epp, Sarah Klassen & Sally Ito

Heart's Hydrography

by (author) Sally Ito

The Emperor's Orphans

by (author) Sally Ito

The Emperor’s Orphans

by (author) Sally Ito

Writing the Terrain

Travelling Through Alberta with the Poets

contributions by Ian Adam, Robert Stamp, Tammy Armstrong, Margaret Avison, Douglas Barbour, John O. Barton, Doug Beardsley, Bonnie Bishop, E.D. Blodgett, Robert Boates, George Bowering, Tim Bowling, Jan Boydol, Gordon Burles, Murdoch Burnett, Anne Campbell, Weyman Chan, Leonard Cohen, Dennis Cooley, Joan Crate, Michael Cullen, Cyril Dabydeen, Lorne Daniel, Alexa DeWiel, Jason Dewinetz, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Cecelia Frey, Gary Geddes, Gail Ghai, Deborah Godin, Jim Green, Leslie Greentree, Vivian Hansen, Tom Henihan, Michael Henry, Walter Hildebrandt, Gerald Hill, Robert Hilles, Nancy Holmes, Richard Hornsey, Tom Howe, Aislinn Hunter, Bruce Hunter, Laurence Hutchman, Sally Ito, Pauline Johnson, Aleksei Kazuk, Robert Kroetsch, Fiona Lam, William Latta, Tim Lilburn, Alice Major, Kim Maltman, Miriam Mandel, Sid Marty, David McFadden, Barry McKinnon, Erin Michie, Deborah Miller, Anna Mioduchowska, James M. Moir, Colin Morton, Erín Moure, Charles Noble, P.K. Page, Rajinderpal Pal, Ruth Roach Pierson, Joseph Pivato, Roberta Rees, D.C. Reid, Monty Reid, R. rickey, Ken Rivard, Stephen Scobie, Allan Serafino, Joan Shillington, Greg Simison, Carol Ann Sokoloff, Karen Solie, Stephan Stephansson, Peter Stevens, Ivan Sundal, Anne Swannell, Vanna Tessier, Colleen Thibadeau, John O. Thompson, James M. Thurgood, Eva Tihanyi, Yvonne Trainer, Aritha Van Herk, Rosalee van Stelten, Miriam Waddington, James Wreford Watson, Wilfred Watson, Tom Wayman, Phyllis Webb, Jon Whyte, Christine Wiesenthal, Sheri-D Wilson, Christopher Wiseman, Stacie Wolfer, Rita Wong, Richard Woollatt & Jan Zwicky

Season of Mercy

by (author) Sally Ito

Floating Shore

by (author) Sally Ito

Frogs in the Rain Barrel

by (author) Sally Ito