Sonder by Issa M. Lewis

Sonder goes beyond the title’s definition: “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” Poems in this moving collection are addressed to inhabitants of a house, a graveyard or a photograph. However, they don’t just describe, but embody the subject of each piece. In “After the photo of unnamed Romany boy” Lewis writes, “You carried a cello as a pack,/ so much bigger than ragtag you. /The weight of the ravaged world on your back…” Poem XVI “after the Falling Man photo” and poem XVIII “after the death of 3-year old Alan Kurdi” are powerful and brilliantly written. This may be a short book, but it carries poetic weight.

–Lori Desrosiers, Keeping Planes in the Air (Salmon Poetry)

In Sonder, Issa Lewis impeccably and poignantly stitches together the lives of the living to the lives of the dead creating a bridge to their humanness. Her work is a call to reverence for ancestors known and unknown that “A ghost is an anchor: a silvered breath /of what came before, a bookmark.”  When we lose the ability to connect with others’ suffering and joy, both the living and the dead, we are not able to throw off “The weight of the ravaged world on your (our) back(s).” Sonder is the stupa bell calling us to repair our relationships, to connect with community, and to honor people’s individual stories as “A name is a constellation, guiding us /through our minutiae.” In a time of over-wrought technology, disconnectedness, and AI, these poignant lyrics remind us that an ultimate duty of being alive is to look and see that “…their face is our face, their feet /our feet.  What sweetness /to see their wanderings.”

–Tyve Neese