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A Library of Light
Incantation and elegy shine through one another in this extraordinary poetic memoir
When poet Danielle Vogel began writing meditations on the syntax of earthen and astral light, she had no idea that her mother's tragic death would eclipse the writing of that book, turning her attention to grief's syntax and quiet fields of cellular light in the form of memory. Written in elegant, crystalline prose poems, A Library of Light is a memoir that begins and ends in an incantatory space, one in which light speaks. At the book's center glows a more localized the voice of the poet as she reflects, with ceremonial patience, on the bioluminescence of the human body, language's relationship to lineage, her mother's journals written during years of estrangement from her daughter, and the healing potential of poetry. A mesmerizing elegy infused with studies of epigenetic theory and biophotonics, A Library of Light shows that to language is to take part in transmission, transmutation of energy, and sonic (re)patterning of biological light.
[sample poem]
When we are. When we are there, we lay together
and cover ourselves with our voices. When we are
ten, we are also twenty-one. We speak of breathing,
but this is a thing we cannot do. When we are
seven, we are also eighteen. When we are eighteen,
we begin our bodies. But we are unmappable,
unhinged. A resynchronization of codes, the
crystalline frequencies of stars, seeds, vowels, lying
dormant within you. We are the oldest dialect. A
sound the voice cannot make but makes.
When poet Danielle Vogel began writing meditations on the syntax of earthen and astral light, she had no idea that her mother's tragic death would eclipse the writing of that book, turning her attention to grief's syntax and quiet fields of cellular light in the form of memory. Written in elegant, crystalline prose poems, A Library of Light is a memoir that begins and ends in an incantatory space, one in which light speaks. At the book's center glows a more localized the voice of the poet as she reflects, with ceremonial patience, on the bioluminescence of the human body, language's relationship to lineage, her mother's journals written during years of estrangement from her daughter, and the healing potential of poetry. A mesmerizing elegy infused with studies of epigenetic theory and biophotonics, A Library of Light shows that to language is to take part in transmission, transmutation of energy, and sonic (re)patterning of biological light.
[sample poem]
When we are. When we are there, we lay together
and cover ourselves with our voices. When we are
ten, we are also twenty-one. We speak of breathing,
but this is a thing we cannot do. When we are
seven, we are also eighteen. When we are eighteen,
we begin our bodies. But we are unmappable,
unhinged. A resynchronization of codes, the
crystalline frequencies of stars, seeds, vowels, lying
dormant within you. We are the oldest dialect. A
sound the voice cannot make but makes.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Hardcover
Published February 4, 2024
4 people are currently reading
66 people want to read
About the author
Danielle Vogel
8 books11 followersDanielle Vogel is the author of the hybrid poetry collections A Library of Light (Wesleyan University Press 2024), Edges & Fray (Wesleyan University Press 2020), The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity (Red Hen Press 2020), and Between Grammars (Noemi Press 2015), as well as the artist book Narrative & Nest (Abecedarian Gallery 2012), and the chapbooks In Resonance (Essay Press 2017) and lit (Dancing Girl Press 2008).
She is associate professor at Wesleyan University, where she teaches workshops in poetry, creative nonfiction, and composing across the arts. She also runs a private practice as an herbalist and flower essence practitioner. Vogel makes her home in the Connecticut River Valley on the ancestral lands of the Hammonassets and Wappinger peoples, with her partner, the writer and artist, Renee Gladman.
She is associate professor at Wesleyan University, where she teaches workshops in poetry, creative nonfiction, and composing across the arts. She also runs a private practice as an herbalist and flower essence practitioner. Vogel makes her home in the Connecticut River Valley on the ancestral lands of the Hammonassets and Wappinger peoples, with her partner, the writer and artist, Renee Gladman.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 8, 2024
Danielle Vogel is one of my favorite sentence writers. Here, sentences become incantations and prayers, calling forth and honoring life as light and lost familial love. It has reignited my own desire to not only write but live, attentively and with reverence. Buy this book (from the publisher) or support your local library.
August 9, 2025
from Light
We come to life now. When we. When we are. We pick up language like a lit garment, wet and shaken out. A shinbone lifts. An elbow. A paragraph. All shot through until our edges dissolve in pleats. We are held together through our separatenesses. We are an ambiance of remains. Wreckage, re-configuring. We are an illuminated architecture. Nothing you know to name. We are a moving letter. Topologies of sound. We are never static, but echoic. As we make shape, we take it. The mouth, unmarooned. We trespass punctuation. A curvature. An arc, unarchived in the sharing. We almost make a circle, but what we mean is silence into sound. Or a coming into focus. We are always in the present tense. The flood of the gap, washed out. We, a word. We, a window. Bring your body. (3)
from of Light
And somewhere, on the other side of time, is everything.
Sometimes, when asked what I'm working on, I tell people I'm writing a translation of light. Light, like the memory of a color, of a sound that we can't quite sense, but is there, nonetheless. Inherited light. Cellular light. Interstellar. Memories that have already happened to someone or somewhere else. (17)
[...]
A poem: this inner geography of light, composed, breaking. (32)
[...]
If I could offer you a book that hums, that unsharpens your being, that undulates, that opens a refuge for whatever is behind thinking when thinking rests, expands, incubating movement and growth, gathering energy at the regions between what is solid and what isn't.
I don't know what was hidden in my mother's body and her mother's body before her. I come from a family of secrets, everything "kept in the family," rerouted into silence. I'll never know what I've inherited, but I've given myself the task of working it out, through language, through the act of looking into what I can't see, but only feel at the edge of myself. (56)
from Light
Our words are creatures across an open room. (69).
We come to life now. When we. When we are. We pick up language like a lit garment, wet and shaken out. A shinbone lifts. An elbow. A paragraph. All shot through until our edges dissolve in pleats. We are held together through our separatenesses. We are an ambiance of remains. Wreckage, re-configuring. We are an illuminated architecture. Nothing you know to name. We are a moving letter. Topologies of sound. We are never static, but echoic. As we make shape, we take it. The mouth, unmarooned. We trespass punctuation. A curvature. An arc, unarchived in the sharing. We almost make a circle, but what we mean is silence into sound. Or a coming into focus. We are always in the present tense. The flood of the gap, washed out. We, a word. We, a window. Bring your body. (3)
from of Light
And somewhere, on the other side of time, is everything.
Sometimes, when asked what I'm working on, I tell people I'm writing a translation of light. Light, like the memory of a color, of a sound that we can't quite sense, but is there, nonetheless. Inherited light. Cellular light. Interstellar. Memories that have already happened to someone or somewhere else. (17)
[...]
A poem: this inner geography of light, composed, breaking. (32)
[...]
If I could offer you a book that hums, that unsharpens your being, that undulates, that opens a refuge for whatever is behind thinking when thinking rests, expands, incubating movement and growth, gathering energy at the regions between what is solid and what isn't.
I don't know what was hidden in my mother's body and her mother's body before her. I come from a family of secrets, everything "kept in the family," rerouted into silence. I'll never know what I've inherited, but I've given myself the task of working it out, through language, through the act of looking into what I can't see, but only feel at the edge of myself. (56)
from Light
Our words are creatures across an open room. (69).
May 8, 2024
a beauty.
"sometimes a disaster can make the body a more possible place to live within. i think this is because disasters can dislocate the self and suddenly it’s possible to realize (or remember) you want your own form."
"sometimes a disaster can make the body a more possible place to live within. i think this is because disasters can dislocate the self and suddenly it’s possible to realize (or remember) you want your own form."
February 12, 2024
So moving
February 24, 2024
this is a mega book predicting/challenging in real time what the book is capable of/will become
April 23, 2024
a gorgeous meditation on loss and light, on how we can transform trauma through writing and light.
December 21, 2024
Resonant
October 4, 2024
I love everything Danielle Vogel writes.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews