Light As Light Volume 93: Poems

Light As Light is Simon J. Ortiz's first collection in twenty years, celebrating love and reflecting on youth and life's stories, scenes, people, and places. It includes prayer poems, traditional Acoma stories, and environmental, political, and social justice issues, blending the playful and profound. The poems travel far across space and memory, landing in various locations, and the central concern is language itself, with the weight and significance of English and Keres and the nature and power of poetry as a way of life.

Format: Hardback
Length: 168 pages
Publication date: 12 December 2023
Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Light As Light is acclaimed poet Simon J. Ortiz's first collection in twenty years. The poems in this volume celebrate the wonders and joy of love in the present while also looking back with both humorous and serious reflections on youth and the stories, scenes, people, and places that shape a person's life. Light As Light brims with giddy, wistful long-distance love poems that offer a dialogue between the speaker and his beloved. Written in Ortiz's signature conversational style, this volume claims poetry for everyday life as the poems find the speaker on a morning run, burnt out from academic responsibilities, missing his beloved, reflecting on sobriety, walking the dog, and pondering the act of poem making. The collection also includes prayer poems written for the speaker's son; poems that retell traditional Acoma stories and history; and poems that engage environmental, political, and social justice issues--making for a well-rounded collection that blends the playful and the profound. The poems in Light As Light travel far across both space and memory, landing everywhere from the New Mexico of the speaker's childhood, to California, Tucson, and present-day Beijing, and many airports, highways, and way stations in between. The central concern uniting this collection is language itself: the weight and significance of English and Keres, as well as the nature and power of poetry as a way of life. No collection of Indigenous literature is complete without the work of Simon Ortiz, and this book is a powerful journey through the poet's life--both a love letter to the future and a sentimental, authentic celebration of the past.

Weight: 456g
Dimension: 185 x 236 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780816550258