Fire at the Big Top by Sandra Yannone
MoonPath Press, 2026
Review by Mary Ellen Talley
What captures more Americana than a circus? What is more frightening than fire? The clown on the cover of Fire at the Big Top by Sandra Yannone is staring at an inferno and holding his paltry bucket of water.
Yannone’s father, “Vinnie,” was eight years old on July 6, 1944, the day his father took him to a Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus matinee performance in Hartford, Connecticut. As recounted in the three-page prose “Overture,” excitement was in the air, “the Wallendas were beginning their act on the high wire.” Then the “tent burned to the ground in just eight minutes,” leaving 167 dead.
Paraffin-coated canvas had both waterproofed the circus tent and made it flammable. Yannone underscores, “To say that the fire had a profound impact on my father and our family is an understatement.”
The poems in the chapbook are bookended by that beginning “Overture” and the final three-page “Notes and Afterword” which provides information to flesh out Yannone’s unique story. The centerpiece is a crown of sonnets, twelve linked sonnets each in the voice of different circus characters, such as the lion tamer, the sword-swallower, the bandleader, and the human cannonball. The human cannonball, announces, “I am encore / Before I am shot into the crowd’s terrified glee.”
In the “Notes and Afterward,” we learn about the final poem of the sonnet crown, “The Fat Lady.” Because there are a few extra lines, Yannone “affectionately call the poem ‘a fat sonnet.’” With a nod to corporeal pleasures, the fat lady exudes her sensuality when she says, “every woman / Wants to be like me in the dark.”
Yannone first presented most of the sonnet sequence in 2025 at a reading in Seattle that I attended. She soon added poems to create this chapbook. Written not long after his passing in early 2023, the chapbook has become a tribute to the boy who became her father.
When Yannone was growing up, her father would imagine the smell of smoke wafting from the basement as in the poem, “Phantosmia.” He “begged me to go down / and check the furnace // from one hour to the next.” The poem ends:
Phantosmia, his neurologist diagnosed
after too long a wait,
otherwise known as phantom smells.
And I started not to believe him,
the doctor, I mean, the more my father
spun his fiery phantom tale.
In the poem, “The Day After, July 7, 1944,” Yannone wonders why her grandfather took his young son to the morgue where 167 corpses awaited identification on “Army-issued cots” at the State Armory, “while his mother and aunt, two of 1,500 // volunteers, aided at one of the four / overwhelmed city hospitals.” Life goes on. No surprise though, that events of that day became seared into the young boy’s psyche.
Yannone’s tight chapbook includes a poem in the voice of “The Arsonist” who begins “There is nothing on Earth I wouldn’t want / To watch burn.” That sentence acknowledges the psyche of a disorder that wreaks pain and despair on many when weather and opportunity claim broken personalities.
When Sandra Yannone delves into her obsessions, readers benefit from her research, associated stories, synthesis, and literary expression. Yannone’s first full-length collection, Boats for Women, focuses on the sinking of the Titanic. Her second, The Glass Studio, deals with family of origin issues and her father’s stained-glass studio. In a recent endeavor, she is co-editor of the poetry anthology, Unsinkable: Poems Inspired by the Titanic.
With the publication of Fire at the Big Top, Yannone brings the Hartford Fire and its aftermath alive. We experience her love for her parents and the effect of the fire on her father. Fire at the Big Top documents history in rich lyrical poems as it honors those who attended the circus that fateful day.
Sandra Yannone (she/they) lives bicoastally in Washington state and Old Saybrook, Connecticut, where she serves as poet laureate. In 2027, she will assume responsibilities as Managing Editor of Connecticut River Review. Her poetry and book reviews appear internationally in print and online in Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, SWWIM Every Day, Skylight 47, Prairie Schooner, Booth, CALYX, Lavender Review, Women’s Review of Books, and The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, among countless others. In March 2020, she co-founded and continues to host the international, intersectional, intergenerational online reading series Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry. Yannone holds undergraduate, master’s, and doctorate degrees in poetry from Wheaton College (Mass.), Emerson College, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, respectively. In 2023, she retired from her career as Faculty Writing Center Director at The Evergreen State College to devote herself fulltime to poetry endeavors known and unknown to her. Visit her at www.sandrayannone.com .
Mary Ellen Talley’s poems have appeared in many journals including Louisville Review, Deep Wild, and Trampoline as well as in multiple anthologies. Her chapbooks are: “Postcards from the Lilac City” from Finishing Line Press, “Taking Leave” from Kelsay Books, and “Infusion” online at Red Wolf Journal. Her book reviews have been published in Asheville Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Mom Egg Review, and breatheeveryone.net. She resides in Seattle, WA and worked for many years as a school-based speech/language pathologist (SLP.) Her website is www.maryellentalley.com.
Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.
