The Weight of Light

Gary Lemons's The Weight of Light breaks down the wall between poet and reader and invites us to meditate with him on all things beautiful and ugly, in a way that makes us proud to be a part of the world. Lemons explores human and nonhuman relationships, dissecting them just enough to give us a glimpse before sealing them back up and tucking them into the pages. He shows us the painful, the heartbreaking, the fearful--but pairs them with the magnificent and the joyful in such a way that we are relieved and elated to have them all. "The hunger in everything wants out," he tells us, and this collection contains the hunger to truly know the world. "It's here--and so am I--and so are you" and we are delighted and humbled to be here with him.

About the Author :
Gary Lemons studied for two years at the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa with Marvin Bell, Donald Justice, and Norman Dubie. He received the gift of time spent with John Berryman. He studied the craft of poetry, then went out to learn the lessons of poetry. He is the author several books of poetry, among them the Snake Quartet series, and most recently, the poetry coloring book Dia de los Muertos. Currently he and his wife, the artist Nöle Giulini, teach yoga from their studio, Tenderpaws in Port Townsend, WA.

Review :
“In an era where a new musical lyric model thumps repeatedly against the human heart—our anxiety rises over the very spooky ecology of Self and The Weight of Light questions and measures this collective arrhythmia. These poems by Gary Lemons say the butcher’s thumb is on the scale. Wonderful poems, dangerously true!” —Norman Dubie, recipient of the 2002 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry “Gary Lemons has reinvented a personal method from a collective mystique for creating poetry; he has written a work of deep insights that could very well reinvent how the world views poetry as an art form.” —Michael Foster, Huffington Post “A cast of monsters, bystanders, victims and survivors step into the light of Gary Lemons’ spectacularly inventive mind to speak truth about the condition of being alive, and it’s as brutal and eerie, as grievous and as darkly comic, as a Hieronymus Bosch painting. But beautiful too, because “stripped of context...” (and context can be harrowing) “All colors are beautiful.” The Weight of Light is a wildly ambitious and mesmerizing portrait of our human struggle to perceive, as James Agee and Walker Evans put it, “the cruel radiance of what is.” In Lemons’ words, “Let’s say awakening hurts.” —Kathleen Flenniken, author of Plume, winner of the Washington State Book Award