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Swallowed Light
Ocean Vuong meets Natalie Diaz in dreamlike, blood-soaked verse that explores the cost of memory and mourning.
Swallowed Light begins at the opened clearing of myth, at the mouth of history. In his breathtaking debut poetry collection, Michael Wasson writes into the gaps left by a legacy of erasure—the wholly American fracture of colonialism—where the indigenous tongue is determined to bloom against its own vanishing. These poems mourn and build with pattern and intricacy, intuition and echo, calling ocean and heartbreak and basalt, monsters and bullets and bones, until they form one vibrant song.
Swallowed Light begins at the opened clearing of myth, at the mouth of history. In his breathtaking debut poetry collection, Michael Wasson writes into the gaps left by a legacy of erasure—the wholly American fracture of colonialism—where the indigenous tongue is determined to bloom against its own vanishing. These poems mourn and build with pattern and intricacy, intuition and echo, calling ocean and heartbreak and basalt, monsters and bullets and bones, until they form one vibrant song.
- GenresPoetry
95 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 10, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 1, 2025
This just isn't really my style of book ..... but to each their own I suppose. I can appreciate the prose even if I didn't particularly enjoy it
July 31, 2022
Excerpt of my review for New York Journal of books:
In America today, it may feel like there exists a vast churning causing a swell that separates the fields of our own making. No longer buried within the dirt of those fields emerges a life encompassed within the collection of poems, Swallowed Light, from Nez Perce poet Michael Wasson. From “Portrait with Smeared Centuries”:
“I begin the day like any other
day: a decade staring back
in the rearview mirror
of the wrecked pickup truck: you
standing so tall you’re already
headless: until I turn around
the cornfield blurs into the torn
edges of an atlas: pull your hands
out from under me to anoint
this god-gifted country of yours:
mottled bones singing
the anthem of a star-
spangled nation:
this land granted enough
time to list its own
possibilities: atrocities
a blade of dusk resting
on my throat, I bruise: by standing”
As one delves into this collection, it becomes apparent that Wasson takes the essence of the words he uses and squeezes them. The life found within emerges like another world—a lost world trampled in the name of Manifest Destiny and a culture too willing to plow into shallow graves everything that lies outside its tunneled vision. Through these words, that which had been lost has emerged with a strong voice, as revealed in Wasson’s poem, “Self-Portrait As Collected Bones [Rejoice Rejoice]”:
Read my full review at www.nyjournalofbooks.com
In America today, it may feel like there exists a vast churning causing a swell that separates the fields of our own making. No longer buried within the dirt of those fields emerges a life encompassed within the collection of poems, Swallowed Light, from Nez Perce poet Michael Wasson. From “Portrait with Smeared Centuries”:
“I begin the day like any other
day: a decade staring back
in the rearview mirror
of the wrecked pickup truck: you
standing so tall you’re already
headless: until I turn around
the cornfield blurs into the torn
edges of an atlas: pull your hands
out from under me to anoint
this god-gifted country of yours:
mottled bones singing
the anthem of a star-
spangled nation:
this land granted enough
time to list its own
possibilities: atrocities
a blade of dusk resting
on my throat, I bruise: by standing”
As one delves into this collection, it becomes apparent that Wasson takes the essence of the words he uses and squeezes them. The life found within emerges like another world—a lost world trampled in the name of Manifest Destiny and a culture too willing to plow into shallow graves everything that lies outside its tunneled vision. Through these words, that which had been lost has emerged with a strong voice, as revealed in Wasson’s poem, “Self-Portrait As Collected Bones [Rejoice Rejoice]”:
Read my full review at www.nyjournalofbooks.com
October 23, 2022
The best description of this marvel of a collection is on its backcover:
"Swallowed Light begins at the opened clearing of myth, at the mouth of history. In his first full-length poetry collection, Michael Wasson writes into the gaps left by a legacy of erasure--the wholly American fracture of colonialism--where the indigenous tongue is determined to bloom against its own vanishing. These poems mourn and build with pattern and intricacy, intuition and echo, calling ocean and heartbreak and basalt, monsters and bullets and bones, until they form one vibrant song."
Ever since I read his poems in the anthology Native Voices (CMarie Fuhrman & Dean Rader, eds., Tupelo Press, 2019), I'd been waiting for a full-length collection by Michael Wasson. And here it is--a wonderful fugue (as in the poem "Self-portrait toward a fugue") of a rich palette.
"Swallowed Light begins at the opened clearing of myth, at the mouth of history. In his first full-length poetry collection, Michael Wasson writes into the gaps left by a legacy of erasure--the wholly American fracture of colonialism--where the indigenous tongue is determined to bloom against its own vanishing. These poems mourn and build with pattern and intricacy, intuition and echo, calling ocean and heartbreak and basalt, monsters and bullets and bones, until they form one vibrant song."
Ever since I read his poems in the anthology Native Voices (CMarie Fuhrman & Dean Rader, eds., Tupelo Press, 2019), I'd been waiting for a full-length collection by Michael Wasson. And here it is--a wonderful fugue (as in the poem "Self-portrait toward a fugue") of a rich palette.
September 25, 2022
embracing the culture around him. more curiosity than struggle.
did-not-finish
November 16, 2022It took about a fourth of the poems to realize this just isn't my sort of poetry.
January 9, 2023
Given the adherence to the theme and repetition of imagery, this is a lot like reading many iterations of the same poem.
February 25, 2024
// Self-Portrait toward a Fugue [No. __ in __ b Minor]
Even in my wildest dreams, there I am
held in the arms of my country: a country leaving
me with the crushed shine of a man's shadow: where I am
a boy again surrounded by my god's
failure of a forest: where the bodies of men are
silhouettes slipping their fingers
down my throat: I say I will change the world
in my wildest dreams—which means the bullets loaded
in my mouth are only teeth: & only crooked teeth
& not the white lilac-
like stains leading me to a window: so clear
in my wildest dreams, my hands are like this:
gone—fingerprints the braille of a mouth
reading touch & moving like sound emptied
into a perfectly rounded hole: in my wildest dreams
I forget the colors left behind
my eyelids: & the blinking of every eye-
witness—the murderers held so close
I swear they're in my hands: in the window
my skin is turned to
a human-hollowed doorway—I shatter
what light has done to me: in my wildest dreams
where the given body is a form of flight
& in this latest version I step into
the wreckage—to find the other side of
me blooming toward you.
Excerpt from an Interview:
"My image of my language is more like flowers breaking concrete or cracking the sides of the pot that tries to hold it. It is unexplainable, even for me often, but I love to see or witness how a language unknown fits or passes through the eye of another. It is both a gesture of beauty and utter hesitation—knowing that this language was here in this land long before English touched our air into America."
Even in my wildest dreams, there I am
held in the arms of my country: a country leaving
me with the crushed shine of a man's shadow: where I am
a boy again surrounded by my god's
failure of a forest: where the bodies of men are
silhouettes slipping their fingers
down my throat: I say I will change the world
in my wildest dreams—which means the bullets loaded
in my mouth are only teeth: & only crooked teeth
& not the white lilac-
like stains leading me to a window: so clear
in my wildest dreams, my hands are like this:
gone—fingerprints the braille of a mouth
reading touch & moving like sound emptied
into a perfectly rounded hole: in my wildest dreams
I forget the colors left behind
my eyelids: & the blinking of every eye-
witness—the murderers held so close
I swear they're in my hands: in the window
my skin is turned to
a human-hollowed doorway—I shatter
what light has done to me: in my wildest dreams
where the given body is a form of flight
& in this latest version I step into
the wreckage—to find the other side of
me blooming toward you.
Excerpt from an Interview:
"My image of my language is more like flowers breaking concrete or cracking the sides of the pot that tries to hold it. It is unexplainable, even for me often, but I love to see or witness how a language unknown fits or passes through the eye of another. It is both a gesture of beauty and utter hesitation—knowing that this language was here in this land long before English touched our air into America."
November 1, 2024
:the limp limbs
of everyone you can no longer save
because you are but a boy
of everyone you can no longer save
because you are but a boy
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews