Collected Poems
by Sandra McGarry
Cover photograph by Pat Slentz
Sandra McGarry writes poetry, she tells us at the outset, because buttons have holes and so does history. Here and Elsewhere is a collection built from those small, durable objects-a grandmother’s button box, a dented fruitcake tin, a whistling kettle, a screen door, a shoebox of someone else’s photographs found at a garage sale-and from what they hold: a childhood interrupted when both parents died within 22 months of each other, a fourth-grade classroom, a marriage, the long life that followed.
The poems are quilt blocks, each one a square of a particular day, arranged so that the years show through. They begin in the East, by the ocean, and end in the mountains of northern Colorado, where geese rise off a pond at first light and the world, as one poem admits, is fracturing in places the poet can’t even name. What holds against that fracturing is attention: to a lemon, to a puddle, to the way a name said aloud brings a whole house back.
With a cover photograph by Pat Slentz, this is a collection from a poet who has spent a lifetime looking closely.
[Pre-order now] · Publishing Tuesday, October 6, 2026
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The poems here are quilt-like blocks. Each began as a white page. Words came. Some easy. Some needing time. Some somber. I hold that a book, between its covers, is like a trunk. When opened, it reveals layers of years. I moved West, left the ocean behind to welcome the mountains. These poems layer themselves from those days to now.
-Sandra McGarry
Praise for Here and Elsewhere
“This collection is lightning, full of ‘notes of lure and wanting’ that will ‘startle you’ out of yourself.”
-Beth Lechleitner, Loveland Poet Laureate, 2025–2027
“Yellow is a lemon sliced, a poet’s coat on an auspicious inauguration day. Time begs to be baked, served in pieces. Savored. Barrels, buttons, baseballs, crayons, constellations—read these poems fill your heart and pockets. Walk this path with McGarry and discover ‘the knot in a line of poetry [that] wakes you up at 2 a.m. singing, ‘Eureka.’”
-Chloé Leisure, author of The End of the World Again
Meet the Author
Launch reading and book signing
Tuesday, October 6, 2026, 6:45 p.m.
The Winslow Hall, 909 Centre Avenue, Fort Collins, Colorado
Sandra McGarry is a Northern Colorado poet. Her award-winning poetry has been published in local, national, and international journals and anthologies.
Sandra’s first book of collected poems, Some Say Poems, Some Say Life, was published in 1997. In 2019, she published her second book of poems, Wild Sweetness.
Visit Sandy’s website: sandramcgarry.com
Book Details
Title: Here and Elsewhere: Collected Poems
Author: Sandra McGarry
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback, 6×9 in, 80 pages
Price: $19.99
ISBN: 979-8-952110-02-1
Available from [panhandlecreek.com] · [Amazon] · [Bookshop.org] · or ask your local bookstore or library.