Let the day bear out/
its breakdown of horoscopes.
from “Gratitude Workshop,” The Glass Studio
In The Glass Studio, Sandra Yannone returns to the memory and reality of her father’s iconic stained glass art studio.
She turns 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 studio. Available from Salmon Poetry.
“The Glass Studio conjures both an external place and a vast interior landscape. Family history appears, paratactic with public history, while historic figures make intimate cameos. In these probing poems, Yannone writes with humility, authenticity, and grace. 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
Silence. Disaster. Desire. Hope. These are the cardinal directions Sandra Yannone navigates in Boats for Women.
In her debut collection, Sandra Yannone plots intersections and transgressions of the personal and historical like a cartographer drafting a nautical chart. Utilizing a range of free verse and traditional forms, Yannone’s poems amplify — and survive — the split-second when the everyday turns into catastrophe: transmitting distress calls from the decks of R.M.S. Titanic; channeling Bess Houdini's crossover into the modern world; and documenting how women discover and recover from the intimacies of loving each other through time. Available from Salmon Poetry and major literary outlets, including Bookshop.org.
"Sandra Yannone’s brave poems contribute to popular history of the time, flooding us with the arc, the ache, of family and lesbian relationships in her first full-length collection. Some poems live in heartbreak, some, in ecstatic joy. They are worthy of many rereads." ~ Mary Ellen Talley, CompulsiveReader.com
Meet Sandy
Sandra (Sandy) Yannone was named Poet Laureate of her hometown of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in December, 2024. This nautical town at the mouth of the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound has influenced her poetry deeply.
Throughout her pre-teen to college years, she worked as a laborer and sales clerk at ViJon Studios, her parents’ stained glass art studio and supply center in both Old Saybrook and Essex, CT. .
Her poems and book reviews have appeared in both print and digital anthologies and literary journals, including Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Prairie Schooner, Women’s Review of Books, and The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. Her work has received the Academy of American Poets Prize and Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Intro Award, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. She earned her BA in writing and literature from Wheaton College (MA); an MFA from Emerson College; and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
She is co-founder and host of Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry, an international, intersectional, intergenerational poetry group and reading series. In addition, Sandy hosts Last Tuesdays with Sandy, a special monthly online reading event for Olympia Poetry Network subscribers, and co-hosts the West-East Bicoastal Poets of the Pandemic & Beyond online reading series. Previous hosting and co-hosting appearances include The Collectibles Lesbian Trading Card Reading Series with Headmistress Press, and as the featured poet and collaborator on the Little Oracles: Divinations podcast miniseries.
After living in the Pacific Northwest for over two decades directing a college writing center, she now enjoys cultivating her love of poetry and all things vintage and nautical from the comfort of her New England hometown.
Hear Sandy on Little Oracles: Divinations
Visit the Press page to listen to the full miniseries: seven conversations about poetry in progress, creative practice, and cultivating artistic collaboration.