Veronica Sanitate is the author of The Palindrome of the Sun (Finishing Line Press, 2026) and holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program. Her poetry manuscript Sun Standing Still was shortlisted for the Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Sanitate serves as Vice President of Ocean Organics Corp. and is a founding director of both the Michigan Collaborative for Mindfulness in Education and Groundcover News, a street newspaper focused on homelessness solutions. The seventh child of Italian immigrants, she was born and raised in Detroit and now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband.
PRAISE:
Opening the pages of The Palindrome of the Sun, one enters the exquisitely realized realm that Veronica Sanitate has created, built entirely of words. In these beautifully written poems, Sanitate’s vision encompasses a rare understanding of art and history, how they overlap and coalesce, and how they become incorporated within the author’s own story of ancestry and family.
–Richard Tillinghast
In Palindrome of the Sun, Veronica Sanitate invites us to experience time as layered and luminous. Anchored by the 11th-century sundial of Florentine astronomer Strozzo Strozzi, these poems become a meditation on celestial and cyclical time, as well as the intimacy of daily rhythms—grapes ripening to purple, bread rising in ancestral ovens. Sanitate traces her lineage through a tender inquiry into temporal inheritance: its circling, its continuity, and the blur where present and past entwine. Our human legacy, she suggests, is to lose time and be lost in it. Yet these exquisitely crafted poems remind us that we belong both to stars and to soil, to constellations and to communities. At solstice and every day, Sanitate insists: “the only day is now.” There are choices—ways to dwell graciously in time. But as these poems demonstrate, to live graciously in time is not passive; you must “make your decision.”
–Katherine Larson
Veronica Sanitate returns to the Italy of her ancestors where she finds an 11th century mosaic, surviving as if out of time, and depicting a sun-centered universe centuries before anyone else dared to. She searches through the old language and through her own set of words, shaped by her new and different world, until she understands the words of the Master, Giordano Bruno, that “the observer is always at the center.” She convinces us that poetry might be the only medium that lets us grasp this.
–Keith Taylor
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