Certainly this is a literature of the spirit, yet very much grounded in and made out of what Jean Valentine called this-world. There’s no palliative comforting; rather it is the hard work of living that these poems sound out, the hard work of love they enjoin. We need this book. I need this book.
KAZIM ALI
Recent books include Inquisition: New Poems (Wesleyan University Press),
Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies, and Sky Ward
In Counterglow, Patricia Killelea confronts the ghosts that inhabit the unlit interior landscape of longing. Like Rilke she “strikes the dark air for music.” She is intimately connected to the land, sky and water as well as all beings who inhabit them. I am completely taken by lines like “When I look through a bullet hole/in a crow's wing /I see everything.” Counterglow is a gem.
PAM USCHUK
Editor-In-Chief, Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts
Author of Crazy Love, American Book Award
The way buried bones remain but still point longingly toward each other, Counterglow is a glimpse into the dark stretched between histories. Every small existence becomes an echoed reason to live... Counterglow stands as a candle burns through the night, waiting for that familiar "taste in the air," trying to outlast the shared paths dark & light make of each other, until they finally ignite.
MICHAEL WASSON
Author of This American Ghost
2018 NACF National Artist Fellow in Literature
ABOUT
Borrowing its title from astronomy, the "counterglow" is a faint light in the night sky that appears directly opposite the sun. Made up of interplanetary dust, this glow is difficult to detect unless one observes from a place without light. Patricia Killelea's lyric poems speak from this darkness as she seeks a language of redemption— some kind of brightness to cling to, however faint. Spanning terrains of spiritual and literal hunger, where ecological and personal crisis intertwine, this collection is an unwavering affirmation of the power of words in the face of wordlessness.