The Weight of Light

by Gary Lemons

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597090476
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	05/02/2017
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.40(d)

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.

Read an Excerpt

Unframed

A child in the forest sits
Atop a downed nurse log
For comfort as well as to
Balance the paper upon
Which she paints a sky
Empty of anything but the washed
Blue of her father’s eyes
When he drank enough wine
To shout at dinner.

At first the quiet trees
Manage to absorb—like carbon
Dioxide—the toxic residue
Of childhood dreams but after a while she
Paints a big sun in the middle
Of the washed-out blue sky.

Later at home she trembles
In bed afraid that in her painting
The sun is going down.

Table of Contents

Winter Tides 15

A Wealth of Little 19

Frontier 20

Painted Ponies 22

Concerto for Horn and Guitar 23

Unframed 26

Tenderness 27

Conquistadores 28

Poverty's Mansion 30

Dynasty 31

Gratitude 32

Color of Gone 36

Student Life 38

Song for Everyone 40

Old Clothes 41

I Dig Music 42

Tacitus 43

Shears 44

Drone 45

The Apartment at the End of Hope Is Vacant 47

The Ferry 48

Rhetoric's Bones 49

Scylla and Charybdis 50

Shipwrecked in Denial 51

Dominion of None 52

Gravity 53

Adieu 54

Emperor of Oblivion 56

Self Employment 60

The Revolt of Everyone 61

Maturity 63

The Artifact of One Another 64

Trade Beads 66

The Ogre 67

Visitor 71

Caste System 73

Texas Two-Step 74

Fox Hunt 76

Landslide 78

Rolling Stone 79

The Bathysphere 80

Leda 83

Both Are Burning 85

Black Rainbow 87

Diffusion as an Engine of Chance 88

Treaty 92

Lodger 93

Last Night with Krishnamurti 95

Grand Paw 97

It 98

Atonement 101

Winter 103

Framing the Question 104

Games 105

Courier's Lament 106

The Model 108

Guidance 110

Ambulance 111

Dark Hunger 112

Virtually 113

In the Jungle 115

The Weight of Light 116

Live Fast Die Young Leave a Poem Behind 117

Birdbath of Saint Francis 119

The Wild Garden 123

Carnival 124

Herb Garden 125

Leaning Tower 127

Missile Crisis 128

Modern World 129

Nowhere to Hide 131

Misunderstood 132

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher