Description
The Temporary Vase of Hands
by Sandra Fees
$14.99, paper
978-1-63534-158-4
2017
Sandra Fees is a Unitarian Universalist minister who resides in Reading, Pennsylvania. She fell in love with language growing up in rural Central Pennsylvania. Her connection to poetry became deeply rooted when she studied with experimental poet John Taggart at Shippensburg University where she earned her bachelor’s degree.
She also holds a master’s degree from Syracuse University, where she studied creative writing, and a Master of Divinity degree from Lancaster Theological Seminary, where she is enrolled in the Doctor of Ministry program.
Formerly a poetry editor of the Harrisburg Review, she has had poems published in numerous journals, including New Madrid, Touch: A Journal of Healing, Yellow Chair Review, and FootHills Press’s Birdsong Anthology. She has been named Berks County Poet Laureate for 2016-18.
Sandra Fees –
Author Biography
Sandra Fees is a Unitarian Universalist minister who resides in Reading, Pennsylvania. She fell in love with language growing up in rural Central Pennsylvania. Her connection to poetry became deeply rooted when she studied with experimental poet John Taggart at Shippensburg University where she earned her bachelor’s degree.
She also holds a master’s degree from Syracuse University, where she studied creative writing, and a Master of Divinity degree from Lancaster Theological Seminary, where she is enrolled in the Doctor of Ministry program.
Formerly a poetry editor of the Harrisburg Review, she has had poems published in numerous journals, including New Madrid, Touch: A Journal of Healing, Yellow Chair Review, and FootHills Press’s Birdsong Anthology. She has been named Berks County Poet Laureate for 2016-18.
Book Endorsements
Quick eyes, clear eyes, deep eyes. The poems of Sandra Fees co-ordinate (focus) all three in their attention to detail – the look of things in themselves and in motion, in their refusal of sentimental blinkers when confronted by life’s all too real realities, in their compassionate understanding of others who may doubt if there’s much to understand. These poems are valuable, of worth, for all who would see and see better.
– John Taggart, author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, retired Shippensburg University professor, and recipient of the Commonwealth Award for Academic Service, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Ford Foundation
This vase brims with lyrics imbued with a quiet beauty. Fees offers meditative poems that breathe with rhythmic, empathic inquiry. Her encounters with solitude and communities of others – family, friends, and animals – hold a presence that embraces joy and sorrow attended by wisdom and precision of language: “Everything you love will fall apart /. . . . Nothing you love will ever be lost.” Loss makes “the air too heavy / to hold more.” Fees writes, “How this happens / I don’t know / only that it does. . . . Breath. Flutter.” Her words press us “close to the secrets of water” the way “a cupped hand cradles the conch / like a talisman or phone that wants to be / listened to, pressed whisper-close to the ear /. . . . compelled to bring the ocean home.” Impermanence may define the transitory nature of life, but the poems of Sandra Fees show us how to transform loss and emptiness into a fullness of attention and spirit.
– Heather H. Thomas, author of more than four collections of poetry, retired Kutztown University professor, and recipient of awards from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry