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Incantation and elegy shine through one another in this extraordinary poetic memoir
When poet Danielle Vogel began writing meditations on the syntax of earthen and astral light, she had no idea that her mother's tragic death would eclipse the writing of that book, turning her attention to grief's syntax and quiet fields of cellular light in the form of memory. Written in elegant, crystalline prose poems, A Library of Light is a memoir that begins and ends in an incantatory space, one in which light speaks. At the book's center glows a more localized light: the voice of the poet as she reflects, with ceremonial patience, on the bioluminescence of the human body, language's relationship to lineage, her mother's journals written during years of estrangement from her daughter, and the healing potential of poetry. A mesmerizing elegy infused with studies of epigenetic theory and biophotonics, A Library of Light shows that to language is to take part in transmission, transmutation of energy, and sonic (re)patterning of biological light.
[sample poem]
When we are. When we are there, we lay together
and cover ourselves with our voices. When we are
ten, we are also twenty-one. We speak of breathing,
but this is a thing we cannot do. When we are
seven, we are also eighteen. When we are eighteen,
we begin our bodies. But we are unmappable,
unhinged. A resynchronization of codes, the
crystalline frequencies of stars, seeds, vowels, lying
dormant within you. We are the oldest dialect. A
sound the voice cannot make but makes.
Light • of Light • Light • Author's Note — Syntax: a bioluminescence
DANIELLE VOGEL is a cross-genre writer and interdisciplinary artist. Her books include A Library of Light, Edges & Fray, The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity, and Between Grammars. She is associate professor of English at Wesleyan University.
"Danielle Vogel is an alchemist of language, time, and the body. Reading A Library of Light, I almost expected my thoughts to materialize in front of me. What a strange, intense pleasure it is to feel the categories dissolving, to be allowed to accompany Vogel in her journey 'through the door of [her] mother's body' and into all the light she both finds and makes beyond."
~Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book
"This gorgeous elegy and meditation on light moves into hidden interiors and considers essential questions of love, loss, and self as frequency or vibration. Vogel consults the library of light, revisiting a psychic silence, a death, shards of memory and intergenerational trauma through a vantage of multi-dimensional being."
~Laynie Brown, author of The Poet's Novel
"A Library of Light is a fascinating book in which language comes out of both 'light' and 'wreckage.' It is also a compassionate reflection on self-integration, architecture, sight, vision, and illumination, built from the affordances of language."
~Prageeta Sharma, author of Grief Sequence
"Every instant for writing is acknowledged as a blessing, in a book wrought with tenderness and care. Danielle Vogel's A Library of Light is a rare book burnt of excess, with the body's larger shape inhering in its austere bones. "
~Sylee Gore, Poetry Foundation
"The pieces, poems, in A Library of Light are deeply thoughtful, lyrically compact and meditative, working her light through the dark, a call-and-response between the two, each one threading the other's needle. Vogel holds what otherwise can't easily be held. There is such an ongoingness to grief, the grief described here, described here in terms complicated and even contradictory; the grief over the loss of her mother, a figure that hadn't an easy presence, and the years of distance they'd had between them."
~rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog
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