Reviewed by Sarah Stern
Keeping Room
By Ann E. Wallace
Nixes Mate Books
ISBN: 978-1949279634, February 2026, paperback, $20, 104 pages
Ann E. Wallace’s third book of poetry, Keeping Room, examines what it means to live with illness and beauty. And neither has strict borders in Wallace’s beautiful and haunting poems. The illnesses she addresses are not only her own, or her loved ones, but the sickness and depravity of the world we find ourselves in now. Her poems force us to confront it, and by doing so, we are able to move forward, as she writes:
to establish this baseline truth
to remind herself,and so I know to listen
with an ear bent toward hope.
Wallace’s poems are also a kind of meditation on how the natural world can soothe us, if only for a moment and if we notice it. Like in “The Day Another Gun Law is Repealed,”
Blooms spring from the concrete
and in narrow patches of light
and green between buildings.Tended or not, brazen flowers show up
each spring and claim their light.
One of the nation’s first Long Covid patients, Wallace writes here too of the continuing effects of the pandemic and brings to mind her previous excellent collection Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul. In Keeping Room, we are also reminded that the reverberations of that time are still very much with us, even if we don’t want to speak of it. Throughout this volume, there are several poems titled “Another Nightmare,” which hearken to that time:
The wooded passage too narrow
for turning back, we inch
our way forward, lost and alone
in the deepening dark.
I love how Wallace names places and makes them holy in doing so, like in “Paper Trails.”
Pages float through the night sky
on the New Jersey Turnpike,Fluttering in the glow of headlights
reflecting off the glistening roadbed…away, away, leaving a trail
of missives in their silent wake.
One of my favorite poems in this collection is about brothers—I have many too. In “Kindred,” Wallace captures so evocatively what’s it like to be a little girl in the midst:
But then you have no idea the intensity of a small girl
…a girl who loved bumpy toads
the color of dry New England earth and the slick backsof salamanders with their finely wrought toes so dearly
that she would hold them in her palms for just a momentthen gently place them back in their homes, satisfied
that they had survived another day.
That little girl grew up and became a poet. Thank goodness. And here we are surviving too in the woodland along with her.
About the reviewer: Sarah Stern is the author of Dear Letters in the Red Box, We Have Been Lucky in the Midst of Misfortune, But Today Is Different, and Another Word for Love. Recipient of two Pushcart Prize nominations, Stern is also six-time winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts’ BRIO Award for Poetry. More at www.sarahstern.me.