Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Book Reviews
Bodies and Open Slowly, will especially enjoy “Part III.” Here Light’s
sequenced poems are a wry and sensitive journey through the riddles
of existence—often, through that greatest of sphinxes, the heart. Here,
too, Light’s deftness with the sonnet reminds one of Edna St. Vincent
Millay, whose form-conscious poems remain free of the musty,
stuffy air often associated with traditional metrics. Indeed, this air is
breathable. “Seeing You Begin to Consider Loving” describes an old
dilemma with refreshing and imaginative imagery:
Sometimes I feel less like a lover than a mother—
a mare watching the wobbling legs of a colt—
seeing you begin to consider loving another;
feeling those new joints quiver and unbolt.
Kate Light’s cleverness is not the kind that sidesteps emotional
authenticity. “Zeug-O-Matic” plays with the grammar of clichés and
yet is also a starkly haunting portrait of an ailing relationship:
He hits home and the bottle.
She wrote a poem and it off.
He drinks heavily and her in.
She went to bed and pieces.
Readers who balance the vocation of writing poetry with that of
teaching may be especially interested in poems such as “Hazing (Or, in
Any Other River): A Bus-Ride Poem.” In it, the speaker relates a dream
in which her students exude, one guesses, most unlikely praise: “In
class: I love the yellow, my students say. / I love the voice. The repetition.
The bare feet. I love I love I love.” But while the students’ words bear
the diction of a poetry class, they seem to capture the universal sense
of the sweet impossibility of events realized only in dreams.
In “To You,” the book’s closing sonnet, the speaker notes being
“Taken for stiff / by some, undisciplined by others”—perhaps referring
to someone who has been more troubled than freed by Light’s looser
metrical sensibility. Regardless, after “bowing” to “the judgment gods,”
the poem returns to its real concern: not to please critics, but to connect
to an unseen reader:
... & if now some small following lifts
that head back up (as I have said) by the tip
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