Echo Light

by Kate Gale

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

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2014

About the author

Dr. Kate Gale is managing editor of Red Hen Press, editor of the Los Angeles Review, and president of the American Composers Forum, LA. She was the 2005-2006 president of PEN USA. She is author of five books of poetry: her most recent, Mating Season, from Tupelo Press; a novel, Lake of Fire; and Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis. Her most recent projects include a co-written libretto, Paradises Lost with Ursula K. LeGuin and composer Stephen Taylor, and a libretto adapted from Kindred by Octavia Butler with composer Billy Childs. Her new poetry collection, Goldilocks Zone, will be released by University of New Mexico Press in February 2014. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children.

Reviews

[Mariella Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Echo Light is a collection of poetry written by Kate Gale and is a winner of the Red Mountain Press Editor’s Award. I bought this book in 2017 at the same conference which I bought Cradling Monsoons at.

What I love most about this collection is the feeling that it leaves behind, as if you could brush your fingertips over the words themselves and absorb the thoughts and images into your very being. There’s something incredibly tangible about Gale’s collection.

Gale’s collection is thick. It’s determined. It’s methodical, purposeful, enlightening. Gale’s writing falls in hard, burning syllables, condensed images, neatly formed lines. It’s a very different sort of beauty from that of Cradling Monsoons, but it is beauty all the same.

Echo Light is clarity found in exquisite, bruising darkness. It is, in fact, nothing less than unadulterated, completely deranged pulchritude.

To me, though, something that could have made this collection stronger is a further sense of cohesiveness. The first section was so vibrantly intense and emotionally moving. I would have loved to see more of it. The latter sections were still strong and gorgeous in their own way, and they fit beautifully together. However, they didn’t seem to fit together with the overall ideas portrayed in the first section. I needed more clarity in how the sections fit together as a singular whole, and as a reader I never received that. Because of this, my overall review of Echo Light is a 3.5.