A Library of Light

A Library of Light by Danielle Vogel is divided into three parts: “Light,” “of Light,” and “Light.” The first and third sections comprise prose poems that are at once precise and abstract, all written in the first-person plural. Cusps—between silence and voice, space and grid—prove fertile: “the crystalline frequencies of stars, seeds, vowels, lying dormant within you. We are the oldest dialect. A sound the voice cannot make but makes.” Age is fluid in these poems, which lightly thread—or hopscotch—around life stages, language, and being: “When we are thirty-four, we are cartographers of empty space”; “When we are only four, we live in empty hours.” 

The center of this beautiful book is a diaristic series of recollections occasioned by the death of the poet’s mother. Here, candor replaces the ethereal “we”: “By three years old […] I would stand close to my mother and absorb her anger, her loneliness, her worry, and I would replace it with a calmer light.” The speaker describes how her mother became a hoarder living in “filth”: “I learned that when a mouse gives birth to a sick baby, it might eat it, taking it back into its body. I want to know how close the womb is to the stomach.” 

Even as the speaker communes with her mother, she remains alert to the relationship she forms with us readers: 

When reading, your thinking touches mine, and, while doing so, your incoming ray of thought, as it enters the book, is refracted and kinked toward mine. Together, we compose a prism. Our thinking striates, scatters. To converge while diverging. 

Each word I place in your mouth is a shutter. 

Every instant for writing is acknowledged as a blessing, in a book wrought with tenderness and care. “To enter into that lineage of light and alter something. I write to vibrate. To hold the various griefs and ruptures. Light to erase the borders between us.” 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.