Plunging deep into the soul, Sally Ito renders a spiritual examination like no other in her new poetry collection, Alert to Glory. With this cohesive meditation of creativity, motherhood and poetry, Ito discerns spiritual gifts in daily acts of raising children and writing. Her images tie in to profound moments with clear, fearless language: a clematis vine ceases to exist when the speaker is distracted by a poem – her first child. “I’m the poem, he says./Look at me!” Children’s teeth falling out, the endless exhaustion of mother’s work, and the sight of an old baby carriage connect to deeper insights.

Sally Ito was born in Taber, Alberta and grew up in Edmonton and the Northwest Territories. She studied at the University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta, and travelled on scholarship to Japan, where she translated Japanese poetry. Her first book of poems, Frogs in the Rain Barrel (Nightwood, 1995) was runner-up for the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award. Her second book, Floating Shore (Mercury Press), won the Writers Guild of Alberta Book Award for short fiction, and was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Prize and the City of Edmonton Book Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous periodicals such as Grain, Matrix and the Capilano Review and in the anthologies Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets and Poets 88. Ito lives in Edmonton with her husband and son.

Sally Ito's profile page

• Short-listed, Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher
• Short-listed, Manuela Dias Book Design of the Year Award
• Commended, Canadian Christian Writing Awards

Sound the trumpets! Sally Ito’s Alert to Glory is a clarion call to “alertness and watching which is the poet’s/ constant state.” These well-crafted poems arouse in us a love of the natural world as well as the everyday domestic amazements.

Ito “face-praises” us into the world in its rich particularities. The old patriarchal God emerges as God the Peace-King, “God, the peashooter, the honey hurler/ of joy.” Behold, she makes old things new—new wineskins for new wine.

These are peace poems for our contemporary world. Alert to Glory is a transformative book both salt and sweet.
- Susan McCaslin, author of Demeter Goes Skydiving

back cover Susan McCaslin

"This is a collection that calls us to attentiveness, and practices it. The words often pile up, deep and thick with thought, and arresting in their images."
-- Dora Dueck, Borrowing Bones Blog

Dora Dueck, Borrowing Bones Blog

Sally Ito's Alert to Glory is a "collection worth reading for its attentiveness to spiritual mysteries and to the seam between the visible and invisible, between impermanence and permanence."

Herizons Fall 2012

Ito's "poems pull – thematically, imagistically, rhetorically – toward two poles: the hereafter, and the unblemished, cherubic spirit of childhood...There are glorious moments throughout this collection."
- Quill and Quire

Quill and Quire

With joyous language, Alert to Glory opens the reader’s eyes to the “[o]rdinary awe [that] compels as suddenly as it recedes/ —a wave that enters, sweeps away, sometimes returns.

Poetry Snapshot: Alert to Glory

Alert to Glory shows us in poem after poem the subtle, fluent essence of the sacred, how it can heighten every thought and gesture. These poems aren’t just beautifully rendered, but have the capacity to enhance our awareness of those intangible, spiritual dimensions of our lives. I’ve always admired Ms. Ito’s poetry, but this book is nothing less than a call and invocation to our deeper natures. No easy task and harder still to do it with such elegance.
~ Don Domanski

back cover Don Domanski