Catch Light
Reviews

David Shapiro, National Poetry Series Judge:
“This is a little Menippean satire on light. It is a dream of rectangles and an erotic history of photography. It is built with the softest tones, like slow shifts in a Morton Feldman quartet. Sarah O'Brien proves that poetry can be made of the subtlest differences and leaves the reader in the happy position of being light-sensitive as a plant. Her book has a rare unity, as if each page were part of a serial thinking in white Conté crayon. One is lost in shadow, and one is found in a festival of color. Such a book of persistence, always flickering with a slightly mad taste for the naked device: an aesthetic audacity. The subject matter of such refined poetry is perception itself.”

Cole Swensen:
“Brilliant—scintillating—dazzling—all the adjectives that come to mind go right to the heart of this luminous, haunting first book. Catch Light is prismatic, refracting light into all its aspects—sun, sight, cinema, photograph, kaleidoscope, eclipse—revealing deeply human connections among them all through their common intersection in memory. ‘We cannot drown in the sun,' says O'Brien, but in this book, we do.”