SANCTUARY, VERMONT
Winner of The 2020 Orison Poetry Prize
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The 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize
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The 2022 Foreword Reviews INDIES Bronze Award for Poetry
This is a book of lost voices, of selfless persona poems shot through with a lyric control so unfaltering it seems Laura Budofsky Wisniewski has written an impossible book. What a rarity, what a necessity for the oppressed not to be generalized but to speak with intricately subtle minds: 'The Overseer says / I am nothing. / But once my mother danced / And I danced with her,' a young girl says. When Budofsky Wisniewski illuminates one person, all of humanity suddenly brightens.
—Katie Ford
“Evoking a century-plus of the doings in one rural Vermont town, where “every day has at least one marvelous thing,” Wisniewski’s debut builds to a novelistic sense of place and plenitude with shades of Thornton Wilder or Edgar Lee Masters.”
—New York Times Book Review
“…this is not a bucolic set of odes to the Green Mountain State; instead, it’s an imaginative look at its dark sides, its complexities, its evils, then as now.”
—Boston Globe
"If the dead could talk—and here they do—the quaintness of American small-town life would quickly lose its veneer to reveal a more harsh and anguished reality. The locals in this stark book rarely succumb to their own frailty or pettiness, however… The result isn’t triumph, but temerity, and a sense of community based on endurance and the turn of season that may or may not bring with it promise. Sanctuary, Vermont is a poignant collective song of going forth and going on."
— Maurice Manning
“"This is a book of history, a book of voices and compassion. Each poem gives us an individual life through which historical events flow like a river. In Sanctuary, Vermont we see our neighbors—imagined, yes—but imagined so well we join each voice as it comes to us across a span of time, from the 19th century to our own present. These neighbors reveal their struggles with class and loneliness, racism and the damage of war, but also show us kindness, beauty, and resilience in a time of pandemic. Each poem is beautifully vivid and clear, but taken together they swell like a chorus—maybe one of those spontaneous crowd events that gets us all singing the Hallelujah Chorus with a host of strangers, until suddenly no one is a stranger and our hearts are open wide to each other. This is an enormous gift for which we should thank the poet and her poems."”
—Betsy Sholl
“…This is a unique collection and will become without question a staple of Vermont literature, although its excellence demands a much-wider readership…”
—Bill Shubart. The Herald
“In a sense, Wisniewski’s lyrical and lucid sequence of poems accompanies Vermont from acorn to tree. She has looked at nature very closely. Her collection is shot through with an Eco-critical awareness that renders it more meaningful than it might have stood otherwise. Wisniewski’s precise eye and gift for sharp comparisons allows us to enter into the lives being traced in the town of Vermont . They show how its ages echo and rhyme with our own, and how, by implication, we may also be tied to the same cycle of death and renewal...
The power of her poetry lies in an extraordinary act of imaginative voicing, and accomplishing the most important work of poetry -- to take the reader out of themselves, and into another world that they, strangely, also inhabit.
—Vinita Agrawal. Usawa Literary Review
“…The premise of Sanctuary, Vermont recalls the late David Budbill's Judevine. Like that locally revered rural poet, Wisniewski creates a fictional small Vermont town and populates it with a shifting cast of characters who tell us their stories in first person…”
—Ben Aleshire. Seven Days
“Sanctuary, Vermont creates a history of Vermont through a rich range of voices that evoke the state’s nuanced and complicated past… This book creates a tapestry of Vermont and its people.”
— Mary Jane Dickerson