Lauded by Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith as 'rare and revelatory' and by National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes as 'a book of spellbinding radiance,' Lighting the Shadow journeys us across vast landscapes of memory and forgetting, of violent histories and myth, of racist brutalities past and present. Drawing on myriad influences—from Kahlo to Jarrell, Darwish to Rukeyser, Brautigan to Clifton—Griffiths expertly examines American and world history through a dually personal and literary lens, exploring what it means to be woman, body, voice, victim, witness... These are live-wire poems that burn and lament, that speak to history’s numerousness, its silences and its voids, and transform those silences into song.
Read the full article here.
