About Keeping Even

Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011

by Sheila Sanderson

Whether the scene happens to be the wildebeest migration trail through the Serengetti, or a pond in Kentucky “growing every minute greener,” or a stand of saguaro in the low desert of Arizona, Sheila Sanderson’s Keeping Even conveys a strong sense of place, of being grounded on “an actual, factual, earth.” The poems in Keeping Even call attention to the various balancing acts that living requires, to the desire to define and locate the center of gravity. 

--Stephen F. Austin State University Press

Sheila Sanderson writes a mature and committed poetry--a poetry that cuts to the bone, a poetry committed to cherishing the elemental wonders surrounding her life.  Sanderson pays close attention to nature and her appreciation is specific, fresh, and hard-won, for Sanderson is a poet who, through hands-on observation, realizes the ironies and inequities of experience.  And so her vision is subtle, wry, and realistic.  The experience of a Sanderson poem is always essential.  Her voice is uniquely her own, and a reader will hear Biblical overlays at the edges, in her poetry's fierce music, in its gravity and concern.  Sanderson commands a consistent and sophisticated syntax, and her voice, her style, support and include the contradictions of hope--which is where her poems brilliantly lead.

--Christopher Buckley

“Before a live god,” Sheila Sanderson writes, “you ought to be modest.”  Indeed, Sanderson understands that you can’t get to the metaphysical without first experiencing and enduring the physical.  In these poems she straddles the known and unknown planes of existence buoyed by a voice that’s at once ironic and sincere, in a word, genuine.  Sanderson swirls her personal myth with Biblical myth to reveal the essential, but seldom revealed, truth that they’re one and the same.  Muezzins and hobos exist side-by-side in Sanderson’s world, and if she doesn’t place us in her native Kentucky then we’re in Istanbul, Arizona, or strolling along the north Atlantic.  Wherever we are, and whoever we’re with, Sanderson reminds us—no, convinces us—that “the closing argument is faith.”

 --Alexander Long 

Sheila Sanderson’s voice—the “satisfying billow and twang” of her virtuosic language and the tender precision of her Kentucky-inflected and Arizona-seared observations—this voice will get in your head and stay there, surprising you alternately with a “tough-luck egg of mouse bones” or with another summer—and sometimes, too, another loved one—“repossessed by the laws of the universe.” How does Sanderson come by her reckless hopefulness? “If nothing else,” she confides, “the years teach more/ than one way to tend a grave.” In Keeping Even, we encounter a woman who’s not inured, not at ease with everything falling “in one of the directions away from center.”  

--Sally Ball 

About Sheila Sanderson 

Sheila Sanderson is the author of the poetry collection, Keeping Even (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011). Her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, and Southern Poetry Review.  She also serves as poetry editor and nonfiction co-editor for Alligator Juniper, the recipient of three Associated Writing Programs content awards.   She earned the MFA degree from University of California, Irvine.  A rural Kentucky native, Sheila Sanderson now lives in the high desert mountains of Arizona and teaches at Prescott College.