Aisle 228 is a book of poems about the Chicago Cubs and listening to baseball on the radio. The speaker also details attending games with her father. The book highlights milestones across baseball in the past 70 years and culminates in the Cubs 2016 World Series win.

“Sandra Marchetti knows that baseball, like life, is struggle punctuated by victories but ending in failure. This is a fine book of verse.”   ~John Thorn, Official Historian, Major League Baseball

“Sandra Marchetti writes like a poet who knows the strike zone. There was a time when being a Chicago Cub fan was another way of romancing the blues. Disappointment was only surpassed by devotion to the game. I love the poems where Marchetti plays catch with her father. I like how the radio is playing throughout this book. Aisle 228 avoids the static of cliché. The poems are new and smooth like a ball ready to be rubbed by a pitcher. Sandra Marchetti writes from inside the ballpark, that holy sacred place. Let her poems guide you from the aisle to the altar.”   ~E. Ethelbert Miller, Author of How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask

“A beautiful meditation on the highs and lows of this beloved game—both the heartbreak and elation it delivers, and how it perfectly hums in the backgrounds of our lives. Aisle 228 offers the near religious experience of finding your seat for first pitch, the prayer said before the ball leaves the mound and the bat cracks, the magic and magical thinking that keeps us believing it’s (finally) our team’s turn. This collection beautifully evokes our deep devotion to baseball—regardless of who we cheer for—making it clear why we keep coming back to the stands and getting on our feet to cheer.”   ~Stacey Mae Fowles, Author of Baseball Life Advice

About the Author

Sandra Marchetti is the author of Confluence, a debut full-length collection of poetry from Sundress Publications. Eating Dog Press also published an illustrated edition of her essays and poetry, A Detail in the Landscape, and her first volume, The Canopy, won Midwest Writing Center’s Mississippi Valley Chapbook Contest. Sandy won Second Prize in Prick of the Spindle’s 2014 Poetry Open and was a finalist for Gulf Coast’s Poetry Prize. Her poetry and prose appears in Blackbird, The Journal, Subtropics, The Hollins Critic, Sugar House Review, Mid-American Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, South Dakota Review, Appalachian Heritage, Southwest Review, Phoebe, and elsewhere. Sandy is a teacher and freelance manuscript editor who lives and writes outside of Chicago.