“Ways to Beg” is a literary globetrot through the wonderfully bleak and bright mind of TJ Sandella. Sandella is an acclaimed poet who has been the recipient of an Elinor Benedict Prize for Poetry, a William Matthews Poetry Prize and two Academy of American Poets Prizes. Before he was writing books, he was attending classes at Walsh University where he would go on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing in 2010. Afterward, he earned a Master of Fine Arts at Georgia College and State University in 2013.

Sandella’s career has taken him to many diverse environments. He has taught English courses, been a writing center consultant and even worked in a steel mill. On Feb. 1st of this year,

Sandella’s journey brought him to John Carroll University for a poetry reading of “Ways to Beg” where I had the opportunity to meet him.

At the time, I didn’t know much about Sandella except that he was the poet reading; that was enough for me. I didn’t expect to be so moved by his work that I would stay after the reading  for an opportunity to discuss his poetry with him. We had a chat about why his verses went into such dark places and I parted with a copy of “Ways to Beg.”

Available at Black Lawrence Press, a beautiful cover art adorns the poetry book of a man with an open button-up, sitting and blowing a mysterious smoke while an owl is perched on his back. It is symbolic of the overarching theme of the book: a person letting loose. It is Sandella pouring out the contents of his mind onto a page. It is a glimpse into what lies beneath the surface of the steelworker, the teacher and the consultant.

Sandella has expertly weaved together words to paint the pages of “Ways to Beg” with every emotion in the spectrum. Not a single verse feels contrived or excessive; rather, they are heartfelt expressions from someone who has lived in them and learned how to express them with great skill. He places a high level of trust in the reader. To him, readers are  not strangers roaming the corridors of his mind but instead close friends walking beside him.

Sandella doesn’t hold anything back and shows that if a writer wants to make someone truly feel, they have to be willing to dig deep into themselves – one willing to delve into the dark crevices of their mind only unveiled during their most vulnerable moments. Those moments, as isolated as they may seem, connect us intimately with the human condition. Being able to share them with others is a tall feat but a rewarding one, as I think Sandella has shown.

His approach has produced a body of work that simultaneously resonates with and propels me to be more emotionally vulnerable within my writing. Each poem immersed me in a world of emotions crafted by Sandella, and I one day want to be able to do the same for others. I wish I had enough words to dive into every poem, instead, I’m going to talk about two.

“Trying to find a way to drag / my bloody heart home”

The first is a poem called “Nightmare on Elm Street.” As the name suggests, it revolves around Sandella watching the popular horror film of the same name. But, more essentially, it is about a fruitless cling to nostalgia and the corrosive spite that grows beside it. The teens of Elm Street represent the life that Sandella has had to leave behind, before bills, before back pain, before adulthood took him into its clutches. They are everything that has been taken from him with the testament of time. They are the experiences that will eventually fade away in his mind. He relishes their fictional pain because it is a brief escape from the agony of his own adult life.

“And being mostly water, there is mutiny in our bodies”

The next poem is “A Lesson in Annihilation.” In this piece, Sandella grounds our self-destructive impulses in the beautifully terrifying idea that we, as beings made mostly of water, are simply trying to return to that state. But really, it  is a grieving man’s attempt to rationalize the loss he is experiencing.

 It couldn’t have been something in her life, it had to be some primordial urge passed down from generations that she simply followed. That thought is what gives him a semblance of peace, and it lets him process such an earth-shattering event. More than anything this poem feels like Sandella grappling with his feelings and he allowed himself to be vulnerable enough to share them.

I am glad that I had the pleasure of  reading “Ways to Beg.” Sandella puts his mind, his emotions and his world on display for the world. He looks back at the life he’s lived as something worth being told and it is. I hope to see what he does in the future.