Rupture, Light by Melissa Reeser Poulin

“There is a tight-lined quiet in these poems as they open into the world and into motherhood: want (‘my want/felt like an animal/beside me’), need, the soft underbelly of belief, the frill of living— and (‘…one grief/inside of everything…’) all written with beautiful language and depth of thought. The poet’s body responds and creates, her words exhibit a keen intelligence as she moves ‘to wrest/mercy from the ground.’ A lovely suite to be savored.”

–Veronica Golos, author of Rootwork.

“ ‘What is there to celebrate?’ Melissa Reeser Poulin wonders in her collection Rupture, Light. Thankfully for us, the answer is everything. In Poulin’s hands, every moment, even those shuddering with doubt, offer wonder and prayer: ‘I linger/ in the heat rising from the grass…. I’m alive, I breathe/ the gas tank’s full, the sun/ shines, our daughter’s/ head reaches/ the silverware drawer.’ Like most of us, she has ‘almost carried [her] notebooks to the fire.’ But this luminous collection is the grateful alternative—Poulin’s invitation to contemplate the daily gifts given as part of a full, complicated life. ‘It turns out we want/ what our parents had:/ some kind of brightness/ we can afford.’ Yes, Ms. Poulin, thank you, yes.”

–Claudia F. Savage, author of Bruising Continents

“Genesis records the first great rupture, light from dark, a creative mystery we cannot know until we experience both. Rupture, Light explores the suffering of division. How grief and its causes are borne. What’s borne is the unborn, miscarriage that carries not the baby but the grief that then lives in and reshapes the mother. Life, it seems, provides improvidently. It ruptures. If Wallace Stevens is right, ‘Death is the mother of beauty,’ then this book shows us how the lives of the living may expand and reconstruct to frame the break and to open our hearts to the light.”

–Jeanine Hathaway, author of The Self as Constellation and The Ex-Nun Poems