In The Glass Studio, Sandra Yannone returns to the memory and reality of her father’s iconic stained glass art studio to turn her artistic attention toward a deep meditation on glass, its properties and materiality. Glass objects inhabit every poem including reproductions of Tiffany stained glass lamps, eyeglasses from an early 20th-century crime scene, and drinking glasses from Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, and every poem illuminates a core truth: that in its fragility, its ever-present danger of breakage, glass casts an irrefutable strength of spirit and light that endures even after death and the closure of the beloved glass studio.
“In her second collection, Sandra Yannone has crafted a new poetics of glass and flameworking. To take in the book’s widely-varying formal choices—from prose blocks to fissured columns to dispersed fragments and shards—is to gaze into a jar of sea glass and understand both the shapes and their silences, their narratives without neat resolutions. What does it mean to return home? And how can radical tenderness and belonging hold love’s fragility and resilience? Like light prisming through a lamp, the poems flicker, refract, ebb, and flow from sorrow’s shadows to desire’s flames. The Glass Studio reminds us that grief, erotic longing, loneliness, intimacy, and memory are all expressions of the same shifting luminosity.”
Ansley Clark author of Bloodline
“With crystalline imagery and sensitivity, The Glass Studio both marvels at and mourns the fragility and beauty of human resilience, with a sense of loss and longing braided into these textured and musical poems. Yannone compiles a glossary of objects, encoding and building the collection’s arc, as personal, historical, and cultural reference points form sympathetic resonances, fusing together to purposefully illuminate the sum of the parts. This is a beautifully formed and radiant collection.”
D’or Seifer co-host of Lime Square Poets and co-editor of Skylight 47
“Sandra Yannone’s The Glass Studio conjures both an external place and a vast interior landscape. "We were/ double-paned," she writes, invoking the inner and outer worlds at once. Across these pages, emotions crystallize, no longer abstract: ‘Love has a tinny taste/ of crinkled foil’ and ‘despair is just/ one bus stop/ on this long ride home.’ Family history appears, paratactic with public history (9/11, the 2016 presidential election, the massacre at Pulse, the long pandemic), while historic figures make intimate cameos (Lizzie Borden, Leopold and Loeb, David Cassidy). In these probing poems, Yannone writes with humility, authenticity, and grace: ‘what you don’t/ know is like/ the future/ remembered, a shirt/ worn/ inside out.’ When she tells us ‘I won’t stay/ shattered here/ for long,’ we believe her with our whole hearts.”
Julie Marie Wade author of Skirted and When I Was Straight
"The shards of past, present, and future—both personal and public—are re-set and resoldered in this heartbreaking and hope-filled meditation on fragility and resilience."
Allison Arth Host of the Little Oracles podcast
"The moving poems in Sandra Yannone’s The Glass Studio are prismatic with past, with longing, with empathy, and, most importantly, with love. There is a deep respect for work and craft in this collection. For the beautiful structures—both physical and emotional—humanity creates in the name of tenderness, community, and kin."
Gustavo Hernandez Author of Flower Grand First
“There is so much more/ than what we perceive... rising all around us/ like immaculate glass/ cities,” assures Sandra Yannone, in The Glass Studio. With lyric intensity and syntactic virtuosity, this poet writes deftly of grief, tragedy, heartbreak, and struggle. Whether elegizing the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting, reliving a fraught apprenticeship in her beloved, late father’s glass studio, or envisioning the shattered mind of Lizzie Borden, these poems illuminate, reveal, cut, and last. This collection is delicate as the fine lamps of her father’s creation, “miraculously whole,” shining with “glass-infused light.”
Kim Ports Parsons The Mayapple Forest
The Glass Studio
In the Copper Room in Limerick, on what should be called Copper
Road, the low copper ceiling is held up by copper walls. They sing me
their copper songs whenever I can be within them under copper
ground. Last visit, Edward and I drank pint after coppery pint
of Treaty Ale, so many coppery pints that we began to see
our reflections in our makeshift hall of copper mirrors; another night,
another friend told me about her cancer but didn’t use that word,
choosing instead to call it something more shimmery or burnished
like copper, while the candles amplified their messages
against the copper walls. The Copper Room always feels familiar
like the press of copper foil between my fingers
that I used to wrap pieces of hand-cut glass in my father’s stained
glass studio as a girl. Every now and then the copper foil
would slice through my unsuspecting skin; my blood would ooze
like a copper river until someone would bandage me,
the blood drying to an even deeper, copper hew. Every lamp
in the studio was made this way: copper foil, silver solder,
a toxic elixir of patina that muted the shine. People
would buy their lamps to hang in their copper kitchens
near their copper pans, but few knew the process to make
each lamp as I did. Few knew that copper lay buried
beneath the skin of the solder’s seams or of all that blood
turned copper that went into the making of their coppery light.
* * *
Disaster Glass
The cubes bob and float in my night
ocean of iced tea, clink
against the constraints of the drinking
glass’ circumference, the glass
won at a Pennsylvania Dutch country auction,
what feels like a century ago, packed
with plastic swizzle sticks from long gone
roadside bars. For twelve dollars, I wrestled
this Libbey glass from the clutches of bidders
eager to own those obsolete stirrers. Everyone
collects something. I was bidding
to acquire my first disaster
glass, my name for this perfect vessel
of ground sand, a replica of the front page
of The Allentown Morning Call. Tuesday Morning,
April 16, 1912 edition, the left headline
listing across three columns to the right:
1,200 Reported Lost on Titanic,
the inky black image of her grainier
than what I imagine it looked like
on Allentown stoops
that April morning
with the misspelled, but well-intentioned
names of the survivors
the Carpathia plucked from the lifeboats early
on Monday, April 15th. Now Thursday evening.
I lift this disaster to my lips, a glass
that rests patiently on the top shelf usually out of reach,
but this was no usual morning, NPR reporting
that the submersible is almost out of oxygen;
there’s thin swizzle sticks of hope that rescue is possible,
the Coast Guard doing all it can to keep on this side of search
and rescue instead of recovery, but the ice
keeps melting into the tea as I quench
my thirst for sorrow. I know the true
cost of this disaster glass’ story all too well.
* * *
David Cassidy Writes Me a Fan Letter from the Great Painted Bus Beyond
From the pages of all those Tiger Beat magazines
you purchased with your allowance, I became more
like sugar with each poster you pulled
from the centerfold’s staples. I never liked
that my crotch was always pinned to the crease,
that girls tugged at my sleeves, ripped off my clothes
and shredded what was left of me at my concerts.
I was hoping to be a firefly that feasted
on night flowers, leaving my scent behind
with my original songs, the ones no one heard
over the din of those pop hits that ABC’s money
moguls shoveled into my mouth. During boxed lunches
on the set, I had to sign thousands of postcards
to girls I’d never met. I was drowning, Sandy,
in the fountain of teen idol fame, and I didn’t know
how to swim. Who does in that kind
of water? So I vanished into those cheap
newsprint pages of 16 magazine. I became
a paper ghost and only the drugs and sex
told me that I was alive. What can I say?
Why am I risking this from the great painted bus beyond
to share with you? I think you know better
than the lyrics to “I Think I Love You.”
Every poem is a spotlight that shines the light
back into your eyes. You need to keep them open
to honest desires. Don’t get caught beneath
the undertow of the trap door’s weight. Come on,
you know how to escape, to get happy. You
almost do it every day, except you act like it’s your shadow
side. You never let yourself fully embrace the miracle of you.
I sang all those songs on those albums that I know
you still sing, when you are alone or driving
with your sister in her van. I know you gave
a private concert to Tara Hardy
in your living room, that you have two microphones
at the ready to practice when you feel inspired
by songs you wore down the needles
in your pre-teen bedroom to hear over and over.
I wasn’t ready for everything that came next
after the gold records and the show’s opening credits
dressed in mod. I should have shaken off that Partridge
Family tree sooner, but this isn’t my ending, Sandy,
this is your beginning. So come on, stay happy,
swallow my songs, my prayers for that girl long ago
who loved me as no one could. Retire all those faded
fan magazines. You know you are happier
when you are unlocked, unleashed
from inside the glass house where you’ve been
waiting your whole ludicrous life to sing.
All of the above poems are Copyright © Sandra Yannone, 2024
