Description
Openings for Light to Pass Through explores through various forms and voices what it means to be a “self,” that fierce but fluid, searching, and ultimately mysterious being we imagine to be singular and constant. What is liberated when familiar identities—woman, daughter, wife, mother, friend—expand, crisscross, divide, or withdraw, and how are intimacy and belonging deepened, in transcendent paradox, when we open to the unfixed nature of life? These are questions Green probes in poems about memory, time, art, nature, family, dreams, and language itself.
Kimberly Cloutier Green is the author of The Next Hunger (Bauhan, 2013). Her chapbook What Becomes of Words was selected by Alice Quinn for publication by the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have appeared in various literary journals, and she has received grants and fellowships from the Maine Community Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, and the Hawthornden Literary Retreat. She is the 9th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, and the Producer-Host of the Rice Pudding Poetry, a poetry podcast and reading series in Kittery, Maine.
Praise for Openings for Light to Pass Through
Here are poems that earn their title, Openings for Light to Pass Through, as they paint the large and small moments of a life so they shine on the page. Kimberly Cloutier Green’s words create music to carry the reader through illness and well-being, loss and birth, wildness bumped up against tame landscapes and the fierce love of a mother and grandmother. Embracing duality is at the core of this collection and Green invites us to experience richness in all the contrasts we encounter, from our work to integrate our many selves into a whole that honors all we could be, to the ever-cycling nature of darkness and light. These poems “exchange a violet breath” and allow us to share in the mysteries and wonder of being truly present to the tiny miracles of life.
—GRACE MATTERN, author of The Truth About Death
Kimberly Cloutier Green’s poems in Openings for the Light to Pass Through bring me to my senses. Her eyes are always wide open and she’s describing the world around her in ways that surprise me. How does she do this? Her language is vital and musical and she creates places where joy and sorrow travel together. The depth of her experiences anchor these poems. She looks at the world with wonder and we are rewarded for it.
—STUART KESTENBAUM, Maine Poet Laureate 2016-2021
Openings for Light to Pass Through lives with each poem more deeply into its title. Green’s craft is stunning: that is, it stuns. Both intimate and daring, she wields language and image with the grace and confidence not of someone who knows where the poem will take her, but of someone certain if she follows the thread of what’s given, moment to moment, light will be waiting for her. Thanks to these breathtaking poems, light waits for us too.
—L.R. BERGER, author of Indebted to Wind
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