Sandra Fees’ poetry book, Wonderwork (Blazevox, 2024), uses language to reflect miracles and create miracles on the page. Fees achieves this through unexpected imagery, diction, and spare, lyrical lines that fluctuate between despondency and energy, doubt and hope. In this compelling first book, Fees strives to heal the world by healing the self.

The book opens with a meditation on a healing bowl:

I wonder how to tune a heart
[. . . ] calibrate its valves,
and revive the four
chambers.

Later, the word “charisma” refers to the heart’s four sections, as well as one’s temperament and the holy, ending with a nectarine whose magnificent flowering obscures the speaker’s praise. Yet the music pours from her, like the singing bowl, ineluctably. Fees devises revelation, moving from bowl to heart to holiness to nature to poet’s song.

“And the stars in their mouths” describes taming ginger mares that eat ordinary hay but relate to the stars in secret. When the humans depart, the horses become dreamers “twitching their imagined wings” as the field of wilder horses above.

[. . . ] plume
into constellations that know
how to wait, that know
to love this broken night.

The repetition of “know” implies that animals and stars embrace brokenness whereas humans seek to break wild horses with “sugary bribes.” Fees’ skillful language discloses our futile desire for mastery, our failure to accept a broken knowing.

In “Some Women Know How to Love a Nightgown” Fees reveals her revelatory purpose most poignantly:

The naked truth of me wants night’s
textured skin against my own—even if it’s a surge
of grief swollen in the womb.

This desire to touch grief leads the speaker to experience dreams “[that] round [her] belly.” Fees’ evocative imagery nudges us toward hard-won, miraculous possibilities through which our lives might be newly born. Similarly, the eponymous poem “Wonderwork,” a gripping conclusion to the book, delivers revelation by exploring nature’s mysteries, inciting us to become “breathless pillars,” to eschew pride and transcend “our bareboned selves.”