Sandra Rivers-Gill

As We Cover Ourselves With Light by Sandra Rivers-Gill A 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Award Category Finalist ISBN: 979-8-9873058-9-8 $14.00 ($4.00 US Shipping per order)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sandra Rivers-Gill is a teaching artist. Her poetry is informed by family, community, and injustices, appearing in print journals, online and in anthologies while garnering numerous awards, including a nomination for Best of the Net. She is editor of  Dopeless Hope Fiends, a book of poetry written by women in recovery. As We Cover Ourselves With Light is her first poetry collection. She resides in Toledo, Ohio, with her devoted husband, where she writes and is a caregiver, prayer, scrap art maker, poetry shopper, and when time allows, a performer in film or commercials. ABOUT THE BOOK: As We Cover Ourselves With Light holds warmth that was stored away and unpacked from the chest of inheritance. Found in its depth is emotive language sewn from faith, love, loss, and acceptance. Remnants of the past and present are fine needles gently guiding an insightful lens through which these poems pull the threads of uncertainty and truth, influencing a powerful tapestry of kinship. Subtle wordplay eases into imagery and music, and pieces moments that unfold into self-discovery. Some poems are spoken with repetition and, at times, the author seems to be looking in from the outside; but she intentionally renders each poem as an experience of her sensibilities, suggesting that the reader draw his or her own conclusion. This debut collection gathers illumination flowing from memory, weaving worth into the fabric of family. ADVANCE PRAISE: In As We Cover Ourselves With Light, Sandra Rivers-Gill immerses us in family, from a 1935 “refined in sepia brown” Kodak moment to the vital present, as a mother realizes in lines that raise a reader’s hair, that “my son is a tree/bearing the danger/of low fruit suspended.” With echoes recalling Gwendolyn Brooks’ landmark In the Mecca poems, Rivers-Gill reveals secrets in closets, charts the “hardheaded math” of the Watusi and captures the dinner table “vacancy” following a father’s “piss on it” front door slam. Turbulent, wise, and memorial, Rivers-Gill’s craft-conscious poems sing, “wade and whistle,” and subtly preserve “the keepsake of unsaid words.” A superb collection.

––Joel Lipman, Lucas County (Ohio) Poet Laureate, 2008-2014

In As We Cover Ourselves With Light, Sandra Rivers-Gill enters that coveted space where there are writers that we must pay attention to. As We Cover Ourselves With Light deals with family and survivals. This family had learned through its ups and downs how to take care of each other with tenderness and care. The author has given us a family “deeply-rooted in resilience” and committed to understanding and learning. We dare not ignore or dismiss them. We meet them in the kitchen of their home for their kitchen is the breath of life, and their song is architecture of their inheritance. Read these poems with the expectation of joy and hope.

––Herbert Woodward Martin, A Knee On The Neck, librettist; The Shape of Regret, poems; Sometimes, Say My Name, poems