Sandra Marchetti’s third full-length collection, Diorama (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2025) depicts a woman in complicated, uneasy relationships with the world, nature, and herself. Marchetti, an administrator at Harper College in Chicagoland, here presents a dazzling array of poems that demonstrate the sure hand with language of a veteran poet who is also an accomplished writer of prose.

The opening poem, “Refrain,” drops the reader into a landscape containing both beauty and threat:

“The birches dizzy me, shaking down

their mint and white confetti crowns around

the scarlet tanager, a trilling sky-high king://

red come orange, come black, come green.//

The coyote cast a wing

and three coronets

back to feign molting,

a confetti whorled white come red, come green.”

Both dazzling and disorienting, this poem exemplifies the poet’s skill with imagery and intensity of expression, qualities that inform the entire collection.

In “Amberwing,” the poet addresses a dragonfly:

“Hover over me,

fat-beaded miracle….//
Scan the grass//

one last time,//

dry as a stone,//

as a woman alone,

climbing the stairs,//

landing nowhere.”

This lonely moment, briefly joining a sole dragonfly and a single human woman is heart grippingly poignant as each faces its own form of “nowhere.”

“It’s a beautiful day

in America and we

are all waiting for

something terrible to happen.”

So begins “Ion,” which turns its lens on the social world and the current political situation.

“At the poetry reading

you discussed

lynchings in Paradise.//

On this beautiful

suburban day,

all I can see is

lucid unease

once we’ve talked about

death….”

Once again, death hovers.

Intimate human relationships, while longed for, are equally fraught:

“I rise tonight to kiss your chest that tastes

of stain. Knowing I have nowhere to be….//

Against our sheets I shift, lie—content

to never be content as you, love, are.”

(“Wakefulness”)

A tiny prose poem, “Little Car,” needs to be presented in full:

“Your car drove alone in the dark on

the drag and all I could see was the flat

black of it—some fool tossing matches

out the window—your bumper bright

liquid at night, breezing to the

triangled horizon. Made of milk from

stars and headlights, I am the lit wind

scribbling your car, the match marring

the ground—a burned underpinning—”

This compact and tautly woven block of text combines the key themes of dissociation, loneliness even when one is not alone, and the alternately beautiful and terrifying aspects of the natural world.

However, this book is not merely a litany of alienation and lostness. As it progresses, the speaker begins a process that the book’s dust jacket calls “rewilding,” forging a gentle and more mutual relationship with the natural world:

“I finger the stems, the veins that pulse

blank chimes as a stream winds

from my watering can through the dirt….//

I bleed, strum the seed,//

my fingers spool as if returning

from sleep. A white feather,

the fuzz of fronds, a green bulb, then

a small fruit—red as my thumb.”

(“Heirloom”)

The final poem in the book, “A Swim at Europe Bay Beach in
July, Deserted,” brings it to an ambiguous close. One can read it as a return to the earlier themes of alienation and isolation, but I believe it also expresses a certain resilience and the notion that some beauty survives us. Again, I quote in full:

“The lake glints green

at the edge of nightmare.//

It’s world’s end in the deep

bay, gray and stumbling.//

The lake itself a tumbler, a boat

you bobbed upwards out of.//

I am convinced now that more

than anything what we want//

is to live forever. No one can

see us, smashed as sea glass, open—//

the ants eating our cherries

at the shoreline.”

Even smashed, the human remains are beautiful sea glass, and the ants eat the cherries and live on.

Marchetti has published widely, both poetry and prose, If this collection is your introduction to her work, you will surely be left wanting more.

Learn more about Sandra and her other writing at:
https://sandramarchetti.net/about/

Buy Diorama from the publisher or from Bookshop.

I wanted to learn more  about Sandra Marchetti and her work, so I reached out to her, and she was kind enough to answer a few questions.

First, please tell us little about yourself. Where are you from? How did you come to poetry and how long have you been a poet?

Sure! I’m from Chicagoland, but I met you through Washington Unbound, a publication out of the DC area, which is where I spent my graduate school years and a place I found a lot of longtime friends. I have been a poet for 25 years or so. I began writing poems in earnest in high school and had my first ones published in the college literary magazine like so many of us. I was a creative kid—I loved drawing and telling and writing stories, but when I got older, I realized I was interested in concise and musical language, and that’s how some of the creativity was funneled into poetry.

How did Diorama come about? Was it conceived as a book from the beginning, or is it a collection of poems written over a period of time and then brought together?

Well, oddly enough, I was working on DIORAMA at the same time as Aisle 228, my book of baseball poems that came out a couple of years back. I worked on both books, on parallel tracks, for about a decade. It was pretty obvious that the poems that weren’t about the Chicago Cubs, going to games with my dad, or listening to baseball on the radio were not part of Aisle 228. But DIORAMA was much more than just an “other” pile. It was really a continuation of the themes of my first full-length collection, Confluence, but with a twist. Confluence in some ways was a love letter to the Midwest, but DIORAMA really complicates that—it deals with the danger of our natural world, and how humans interact with it. Additionally, the book explores my poetic influences and centers female hunger (in many forms) as a
theme. I wanted to write a poem paying homage to and interrogating my influences without it reading like a book of “exercises” or ars poeticas. I wanted to write polished poems including my poetic lineage.

Readers like me, coming to your work for the first time, may not be aware that you are a big baseball fan. One of your books, Aisle 228,  even won an award for best book about baseball. Poets seem especially drawn to the sport. How did you develop an interest in baseball? Have you written about it elsewhere?

That is true! Poets are drawn to baseball. Whenever I’ve guest edited an issue of a magazine dedicated to the sport we’re flooded with submissions. I do think it’s a poetic sport—the outdoor nature of it, the symmetry of the game, and the sort of “holy” undertones and history of the game lend it to poems. When I was a kid I watched games with my dad almost every day—it was how we bonded. I have memories at an early age of going to Wrigley Field and watching lots of games on TV. I’m a rare bird—a highly competitive person who is also a poet—so this fits me well. I have written a bunch of essays about baseball, too. You can find them most recently at AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, but also at Fansided and HAD. I’m also continuing to write baseball poems after the book, and those are online and in print at various journals.

In addition to your poetry, you have written and published many essays. What are some of the things you write about and what is the relationship between that work and your poetry?

As I mentioned above, I do write essays about baseball, but I write about other sports as well. I’ve published essays about Michael Jordan and The Last Dance, Katie Ledecky’s swimming and my own chronic pain, and the elements of figure skating ahead of the Milano Olympics at Fansided (this last one is forthcoming). I also write about, well, writing. I have some essays out at the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s blog about writing residencies, how I battle with prepositions in poems, and upsetting adjective order in poetry. I oftentimes write essays that center subjects or issues in my poems. The essay gives me an opportunity to have more of a conversation with readers about a subject I care about and want to examine. I’m able to simply write more and provide some researched context into an observation that may remain quite spare in a poem. I’ve also written essays to accompany poems in publications, which is a cool juxtaposition.

You are the Assistant Director of Academic Support at Harper College. How did your career lead you to this position? How does it feed your writing?

I began as a writing tutor in grad school and have held that job on and off through my professional life. I also worked as full-time faculty for a few years, an adjunct for a bunch more, and an academic advisor. But, I’ve always kept one foot in the door of academic support. I really love mentoring student tutors and am glad to be able to do that now, even though it’s hectic! I also felt that as a tutor, the real learning happened when I worked with students one on one. At this point in my life, the way this job helps out in my writing life is that it doesn’t interfere or drain me. When I taught writing, I was often so sick of reading student work and talking writing that I had no interest in writing myself. This job allows me to have my weekends free, and Fridays off during the summer, to work on what really matters to me. It’s also flexible with off time for touring, residencies, etc.

And finally, what are you working on now? Can we expect a new collection soon?

I am writing poems, and have a good cluster done. It’s almost a manuscript but not quite. I was recently in the PNW at an artist colony, Mineral Arts and Residencies, and as I was looking at the poems on the walls it seemed like something was missing. The quantity is there, so it will be addition by subtraction or substitution. Either way, usually when I get to this stage in the process, I have a few more years to go before publication becomes a reality. Plus, I’d love to have a little break from touring and promoting after DIORAMA. Maybe check back in 2030? You’ll see my work in literary magazines and other places, though, in between.

Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions.

Of course! Thanks for having me.