Road Worrier: Poems of the Inner and Outer Landscape by Sandra Anfang

Sandra Anfang’s new collection, Road Worrier, carries the reader across an atlas of lyric  landscapes—a series of explorations, both literal and mind-shattering. From a Bedouin wedding in Tunis to the Arizona deserts, from an ancient Hopewell site in mid-America to adventures in Costa Rica to nighttime kayaking on the Pacific coast, her poems marry risk and thrill, true terror, sheer pleasure. She, too, grows into her landscapes. As a young visitor to the Ozarks, she writes, “the world/inside my head/was about to open/like the Red Sea.” By the end of this splendid volume, she’s found her compass and the comforts of her Promised Land” “Our eyes ignite and hold; a light both momentary and eternal.”

–Peter Neil Carroll, Author of The Truth Lies on Earth: A Year by Dark, by Bright

This “little” (in length only) book Road Warrior is a marvel.  Sandra Anfang paints the colors and textures not only of geography but more significantly of a young woman’s coming of age in travels real and imagined through Tunisia, Costa Rica, Spain, the Ozarks, Arizona Badlands, Mount Everest, Sequoia Park, the Arctic Circle, Jamaica, Yucatan, and in Northern California.  Along the way she encounters bears, assorted characters both sweet and salty, mountains, rivers, and herself. From a “Bedouin Wedding” at which the bride “…has given everything for this moment” to “Spring Break In The Ozarks” with its denizens who cause her to feel like an “alien from the Planet Detroit,” Anfang deftly chooses “my words cut on a razor strop.”  Watching a Mount Everest ascent on HBO, “adrenaline grips me like an ardent lover.”  She hears the “songs” of salmon among which is the “tinny tremolo of gravel-nestled eggs.” Perhaps most dramatic is her life changing encounter with a mother bear protecting her cubs in “Ursa Major.”  The poet recognizes herself and the unique in motherhood: “I’ve seen that look in a thousand mothers’ eyes:/ this child eclipses all that came before.” I love and respect this book!

–Ed Coletti, The Problem With Breathing and No Money In Poetry

When I’m exhausted by how regular my life can be, I turn to literature–specifically, to books that seem to slip me out of my personal experiences and perspectives, and this physical environment, propelling my mind toward another place or time.  At least since the epochs of The Odyssey and Aeneid, probably well before, readers have come to poetry to be exhilarated by events played out in faraway lands by wild, risk-taking characters.  Sandra Anfang’s vivid chapbook Road Worrier holds much to satisfy such a reader.  These poems unfolding in South America, North Africa, the Ozarks, on Everest and in the poet’s home and memory are full of detail and acute sensation, conveying “the heft of a stone ax / in my hand, the thrill of a plumb bob,” the satisfaction of youth and experience combining in one consciousness.

–Kathleen Winter