Reviewed by Judy Swann
Dear Letters in the Red Box
by Sarah Stern
Kelsay Books
January 2026, 102 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1639808342
Sarah Stern’s book Dear Letters in the Red Box is an invitation into her family. We grieve with her over the loss of her elderly and ponder the insights she gleans from the past. This is a book of memories. Themes of light, alienation, surrender, knowing and not knowing, are explored in love-filled snapshots of family members, primarily her mother, also a poet.
Let’s linger for a moment on the volume’s title. The cover image is Matisse’s Red Studio, the artist’s productive space, the blood-red womb of his creations. Stern’s blood-red womb is a box stored in an upstairs closet from which her mother periodically takes everything out before packing it away again. Love letters, passports, receipts. “The photos in no order.” There’s no understanding this routine, but it is satisfying in its “containment[,] like a short day in winter,” she writes. (“High Heels,’ p. 31)
In her “Haibun for Mom’s Papers,” (p. 27) Stern confesses that she has spent more than a year studying her mother’s work, taking notes. She sees that her mother wanted “to be in the world without impediment. To see the light fall through the forest. To be.” Light is important to this book. In the poem, “Her Clip-Ons,” (p. 28) Stern notes of her mother that there “was nothing left of her except the flat light / that came through the old house windows.” Later, in a moment of epiphany Stern gives us a diver “that moved with his thoughts as though the fish, / the water, the leaked light, he, himself, were all one—” (“Mackerel,” p. 74) In “Chanukah” (p. 98) we meet the father cutting “large Shabbat candles in half / so they’d fit nicely” in the menorahs he brings down from the shelves. “Dad had a thing about light,” she writes. In the volume’s opening poem, “Soup,” (p. 24) Stern bookends her mother’s romance with light to a surrender in the shadows: “I wish I could let go, not realize I’m moving / like water, it knows nothing of itself. / Shadow too, across the stairs, it knows nothing.”
Which brings us to Stern’s tango with knowledge, or more precisely with not knowing. Time and again, she spotlights a moment of the opposite of certainty. In “Seeing Rilke, April 2020” (p. 41), a parliament of fowls “sing[s] of things we can’t know yet.” In “4215” (p. 85) a tableful of toddlers visiting the memory care facility gurgle “about things we can’t know.” In “Bianca” (p. 58) a young man wakes up to a cat on his chest “from where he didn’t know.” “The Chairs,” (p. 51) opens with “No one knew when the snow had started,” and ends with “not knowing, how could we, how could we—” foreshadowing the inexorable loss of all life, things, phenomena. For a book so bound up with the fixative faculties of memory, this nod to evanescence intrigues. In “The Narrows” (p. 63) Stern wanders explicitly through “the nakedness of what is” as it “shoots by us like stars.”
Towards the end of the volume, we read in “The Mall” (p. 94), that the poet “[i]n DC last weekend” saw “a sign / on the Mall that said everything is temporary. / I took comfort in it.” As well she might. We anticipate the loss of our elders and we wrestle with the end of the past. This is the human condition.
But it’s not all smooth, this human condition. The first stanza of the first poem shows the mother hanging laundry:
the way she did many things—
there was a sadness in the inquiry—
but also a fiery freedom, like yes,
we’re still here, you bastards.
In fact, this world can be grimy, unsettling, even grotesque. In “Venice” (p. 54) we see a couple sleeping in a gondola, “leaning into each other / their mouths open…” and the poet concludes:
How vulgar in these years of plenty,
And not plenty.
My life too.
Guilt, grudges, ugliness
The turning inward.
My dark heart, I hear you.
But for the most part, the poet takes her own advice and looks for “the lines that soothe,” and says with the same “sadness of inquiry” ascribed above to her mother:
Love and loss.
To write of them is really a luxury.
I didn’t know it then.
About the reviewer: Judy Swann is a poet and essayist. Her work includes Fool (Kelsay Books, 2019) and Stickman (John Young, 2019). She lives in Ithaca, NY.