Complicated landscapes of beauty, threat, and unease
a review of Sandra Marchetti’s Diorama
by Gregory Luce
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, who resided in the D.C. area while completing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at George Mason University, 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.
Though Marchetti has published widely, both poetry and prose, I had not encountered her work until my co-editor, who was her schoolmate at Mason, alerted me to this book. I urge you to read it and, like me, your appetite for more will most likely be whetted.
Buy Diorama from the publisher or from Bookshop.
Upcoming Events:
June 14. Sandra Marchetti is a featured reader in the PorchLight Summer Reading in Iowa City.
June 15. Attend a free writing workshop with Marchetti online or in person in Iowa City. Co-sponsored by Iowa City Poetry and PorchLight Literary Arts Center.
June 16. Sandra Marchetti is a featured reader at River Roads & Cafe’s “An Evening of Poetry” reading in Chicago.
Learn more about the poet and future events on her website: https://sandramarchetti.net
Sandra Marchetti is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, DIORAMA, from Stephen F. Austin State University Press (2025), Aisle 228 (SFASUP 2023), and Confluence (Sundress Publications 2015). Sandy is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry appears widely in Poet Lore, Blackbird, Ecotone, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from George Mason University and now serves as the Assistant Director of Academic Support at Harper College in Chicagoland.
Gregory Luce is the co-founder and poetry editor of Washington Unbound. He has published six chapbooks. He lives in Arlington and serves as Poetry Editor of The Mid-Atlantic Review and writes a monthly column for the online arts journal Scene4.
