Echo Light

by Kate Gale

Overview

Poetry. "The poems in Kate Gale's ECHO LIGHT do what poems should do—they give wings to darkness, shadows and bruises. We find ourselves lost in cornfields and then saved in a desert, a city, unsuspected places. Gale crafts poems that are 'curiously powerful' and offer us 'salvation from boredom.' The stories, the speakers weave myths of intoxication and sensuality, reminding us of 'words you aren't saying.' They roam from earth and snow to sun, stars and sky. ECHO LIGHT 'has invented the world' of poetry that we yearn for—a world full of imagination, music and flight."—Lory Bedikian

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780985503185
Publisher:	Red Mountain Press
Publication date:	09/30/2014
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Kate Gale is Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review and President of the American Composers Forum, LA. She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. She is the author of six books of poetry including The Goldilocks Zone from the University of New Mexico Press in 2014 and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis which had its world premiere October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee.

Editorial Reviews

10/15/2014
A novelist and librettist as well as a poet, Gale evokes the world of Southern California in her poems. Her subjects include love, sex, family dysfunction, and substance abuse, with many of the poems depicting a rough childhood. She's best when capturing the sensual by using a rush of words to evoke the moment, as in "The Mouth Under the Mango Tree": "he found her lips first skirts light/ mouth wet open let's stop here." In other poems, including "Joe's Napa Girlfriend," the author employs repetition to good effect, "She licked the rim of the glass./ She licked the rim of my glass.// She gave me room in the bed./ She gave me. She gave me." The finest pieces, including several prose poems, are focused, with nary a wasted word, but too often the tension slackens, and Gale resorts to clichés or overblown language, for example, "To the/ white pillared beauty of her girlhood before the gods/ spanked reality into her bones leaving her speechless." An enticing element of mystery hovers over a few poems. "Shura" begins, "It wasn't a face any more. A broken thing./ Opened wide by time, cavernous washes of memory." VERDICT Ultimately, this is a mixed collection from a talented writer. The subjects covered are important: the loneliness sometimes underlying erotic encounters, pain caused by parents' abuse, and the heavy pull of the bottle or powder. As Gale describes it in "Living with Ghosts," "There is no way out. What story do you want?"—Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

Library Journal