The Body Yet Becomes the Light

Abstract

THE BODY YET BECOMES THE LIGHT examines the mind’s fluidity, how it fills in gaps in family history, encounters racial alterity, and what a writer brings to the poetic line even if they do not intend to. These poems investigate the self as a site of interruption, how a bird’s eye can reflect unspoken violence—how a candle can capture the dream burning in it. The collection explores how we constitute ourselves through our surroundings, whether that be through the child working at the restaurant or the writer at the desk. These poems scrutinize the edges of dream, work, and nature through a situation of personal diaspora; how does labor affect a child, a family? What does it mean to want to become a myth, or animal-like, or to write at all? The collection contends with escape—exploring how language collides with a fraught world and in turn reinvigorates, relinquishes, and reveals parts of us that lay unsprung.