Light Entering My Bones

by Sally Albiso

"I knew the story already, but I rushed through part one, as if it were a who-dun-it, waiting as Albiso in her well-chosen words and poignant images tracks the elusive tumor and its hopeful demise. I knew the outcome already, but, facing her death, Albiso gracefully turns not to what will happen, but to every direction the soul travels as it lives and contemplates. In heightened language, she explores angels and birds, trees and light, Judaism and flight, letting each beloved experience count. The last poem reflects on lines from Neruda to lift us finally into 'a radiance that can't be subdued.'"
-- Alice Derry, author of Hunger "What is it we expect from death?" Sally Albiso asks in her poem "After the Neighbor's Dog Dies." In her final book, Light Entering My Bones , she chronicles the process of dying, the pain of cancer treatment, and how to inhabit a body she knows will not survive...What time she has left, she measures by the rhythms of the natural world, as if this is the only way she can inhabit a body that has turned against 'I cough up feathers / and dream of singing/light entering my bones.'...The poems in the book never descend to self-pity, but rather find compassion for her husband, the one who will be left behind...At their core, these are love poems... Brave, articulate, with a sharp curiosity, these poems take us step by step through a journey we know will be our own. At times painful to read, you will emerge from the spell of this book with a renewed appreciation and compassion for your own brief life."
-- Karen Whalley, author of My Own Name Seems Strange to Me

136 pages, Paperback

Published August 8, 2020

Reviews

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good poems. Sally Albiso died of cancer in 2019, and her husband John oversaw the completion of this book. Moonpath has now named a poetry book prize after Sally; I was a finalist in that competition last year. The poems here are accessible, smart, and touching. I found myself especially interested in the ones about Albiso’s cancer journey, but there are many others that show the special flare she had for combining seemingly unrelated elements. In “Confession of a Woman to the Unlikely Priest of Wind,” she writes, “I fear disappearing, mea culpa,/of turning to dust when touched//as moths do, whose devotion to the moon/is true while I no longer bleed.” Later in that poem, she writes “To bead the windows//with a rosary of rain my gaze repeats./To howl in my stead.” She also omits unnecessary pronouns as seen here. I wish there were more books to come. In addition to this volume, Albiso published two chapbooks, The Notion of Wings and The Fire Eater and the Bearded Lady.