Ways to Beg

T.J. Sandella’s poems have compassion, humor, grace, and range. He writes about himself and others, about music and sex and trees and Houdini, and death, of course, else how would we recognize him as a poet? But what moves most deeply across and within these poems is an engaging mixture of curiosity and conscience, a need to discover various kinds of truth, whether ethical or aspirational. In poems that “keep bending/into questions,” he moves graciously across what he sees, what he has done and what he has imagined doing or becoming. One poem asks, “How long/until we become what we’ve always wanted to be?” That none of the poems answer that question shouldn’t be held against Sandella. That all of them try is to his credit and our immense benefit.
—Bob Hicok, author of Hold

Ways to Beg risks the big questions. These poems ignite, they incinerate the straight line—the easy road to sweetness—to ask: What does it mean to be sanctified? In an avalanche of grit and tenderness, Sandella roils with heartbreaking humanity. He speaks in the voice of the working class, of salvation and truth as a wild act. This is a brave and beautiful book.
—Jan Beatty, author of The Body Wars

Ways to Beg aches as it gazes into the upended present with an unflinching eye, searching for a home. There’s loneliness here, and a belief in companionship and the power of another to both heal us and to open us. I love the way surprise leads us to the familiar and the familiar to surprise, and how the poet renders the ordinary and the tragic as equals. Woven together into a fugue, each poem builds moment by intimate moment. These poems begin in the noise and commotion of the world and travel toward quiet reflection after the loss of a mother. It is here that the work crescendos, the pain of grief reminding us to hold each moment and to make it, in no small way, sacred.

—Dorianne Laux, author of Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize