Catch Light

Delicately rhapsodic meditations on light, photography, and perception.

“The whole / world is synonyms,” says Sarah O’Brien in a debut collection that addresses all things photography—from its history to the necessity of light and white space, and from the thrills of its technology to the way we talk about and caption photographs, and the ways they, in turn, capture and change the world. In Catch Light, each poem becomes a miniature snapshot that locates the reality in illusion, tests the perception of imagination, and throws open the windows of visual narrative.

Publication date: September 1, 2009

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 7.5

Page count: 92 pages

ISBN: 9781566892377

Sarah O’Brien is a graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Originally from Ohio, she is a frequent traveler who has lived in Cape Town, and resided most recently in Paris. She is the translator of Ryoko Sekiguchi’s Heliotropes, and Catch Light is her first full-length collection of poetry.

“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.”

—David Shapiro

“The refined subtly of these poems contains an epic energy that shivers like atomic orbitals just beneath the surface and results in eventual flashbulb blow outs.”

—Jacket

“A beautiful book whose making-strange lies less in its linguistic experimentation (though there is that, too) than in reminding us how strange it is to be in the world at all.”

—Quarterly Conversation

“O’Brien masterfully re-creates scenes that feel familiar.”

—NewPages

“Brilliantly written poems all joined together in a beautiful unity, exploring the limits and power of imagination, perception, memory, and reality, most importantly in relation to the human experience of light.”

—Feminist Review

“O’Brien has a hovering touch, a light grace, yet the plots have sparked arcs. A serious arena.”

—Esther Press

“A refreshingly novel and subtly smart take on the potentially well-tread terrain of apertures and eyes.”

—Diego Baez, Barrelhouse

“Brilliant—scintillating—dazzling—all the adjectives that come to mind go right to the heart of this luminous, haunting first book."

—Cole Swensen