Grounded in the landscapes of Indiana and the midwest region, WHERE THE LIGHT FEEDS is a lyric meditation on ecology, elegy, heartache, and homecoming.
Formally and substantively, these poems insist that patient attention--to the world, each other, and language-enacts the kind of faith that helps people stay. Across these poems, a lyric I and lyric you move through regional geographies and inner terrains of memory, grief, and fear--ever in search of a softer ontology. With a sharpening focus on language and image, the poems in this collection usher their inhabitants into a more inhabitable world.
"How does one find the faith one can have faith in? Look up into the answerless sky and see what the in their winging prophesize--. Let the ancient elements of water and wind and light play god--. That most ancient of anxieties sounds its drone in the blank beneath the words of Susannah Lodge-Rigal's astonishing and astonished debut. Astonishing because the poems, in singularly etched lines of lyric honesty, teach us to seek the world they also seek; astonished because they suffer the world they find. It's a strange and lovely way of being that unfolds in these pages. Moving from the want of any omen that might say what is to come, to the fretful hope that a poem could catch the world it names, 'an ocean / no more certain than a word, ' and a word not certain at all. But song can make of itself its own home, 'the hum you're living now, ' wordless tune that worlds us, so we can arrive in our days 'more human / than we'd hoped.' WHERE THE LIGHT FEEDS is no book of prophecy--it is better than that. It is a book of the hours becoming ours, a book of the minutes in which love manifests, a book teaches us to say what it learns to sing: 'thank you for the luck.'"--Dan Beachy-Quick
"Maybe in English there really is only one single word for sky--a fact these poems contemplate and honor with deep attention. Yet, Susannah Lodge-Rigal's faithful, sonic, and steady caesura adds to our lexicon a gesture that offers itself up as synonym. In such pauses, hewn and hued and near-endless, Lodge-Rigal renders expansive how we can keep calling by the same names what is is: care, sky, light, bird, you. Here we find 'what quiet // makes on the underside of breathing' and in that quiet WHERE THE LIGHT FEEDS arrives--an utterly beautiful book. Page after page a record of where where poems rescue, hum the landscape. Their lines sing to the horizon always in sight, to a you somewhere listening."--Monica Berlin
Poetry. Nature. Family & Relationships.
