First Light
poems by Susan Aizenberg with linocuts by Kevin Bowman
Prairie Lights Reading / October 18
fine press edition limited to 90 copies
10 1/8 x 5 1/4 x 5/8 inches (closed), 35 pages
ISBN 978-0-9904562-6-1
When Susan Aizenberg opens the door for you into one of her poems, it’s not simply to show off her artistry, which is always a current flowing, nor does she limit her focus solely to the most bizarre subjects in order to dazzle and put you off balance, though she does deliver the strongest and strangest experiences with great intensity, at times mixing humor and pain in equal measure. But beyond those gathered forces, her work grabs you up to transport you to a state of awakened sensibility that’s rich with emotional and philosophical connection. And isn’t that why we read? This book delivers a powerful encounter with our mortality and fragility, which the final illness and death of a parent inevitably brings on with great force, and which every day must be faced, if possible, in poems of great honesty and sensitivity, life-giving and life-loving, knowing “what must be allowed” and standing up for it in first light. — Gregory Donovan, author of Torn from the Sun (Red Hen Press, 2015) and founding editor of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts
These are poems about coming of age and coming to terms with being and losing a parent. A young woman in 1970 watches “the morning sky flare and blacken over the draft board.” A mother visits her son in jail, carrying “a brown paper sack like the ones / I’d packed your school lunches / in, but this one holds the public defender’s / recommendations: toothbrush, comb, / a pack of Lucky Strikes.” A daughter keeps vigil as a mother begins “in earnest the hard/ work of [her] dying.” In the title poem, the speaker calls a student’s handmade gift “[a]nother love I did not earn.” With the tender yet unflinching poems in First Light, Aizenberg has earned her readers’ love. — Erin Murphy, poetry editor of The Summerset Review, author of Human Resources, (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming) and Assisted Living (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2018)
In these pages the smallest thing is blessed with vision so that first light itself is also last light and all the variable light which helps a person from one increment of human understanding to the next. Here, the smallest incident and the largest events are equally lived through: a mother is dying, has died; a girl plays her records in the privacy of her bedroom and only she knows the secret of what she hears. Faraway children are exploited for their almost-nothingness, and a young man survives Vietnam, but not much else. Susan Aizenberg drops into her life almost unexpectedly while the poems lean into each other threaded by this poet’s sensibility and her gathering of great feeling into a whole, fluid experience for the reader. — Jody (Pamela) Stewart, author of Ghost Farm (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2010) and Just Visiting (Grey Suit Editions, London, 2014)
Susan Aizenberg is the author of three poetry collections: Quiet City (BkMk Press 2015); Muse (Crab Orchard Poetry Series 2002); and Peru in Take Three: 2/AGNI New Poets Series (Graywolf Press 1997) and co-editor with Erin Belieu of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press 2001). Her awards include a Crab Orchard Poetry Series Award, the Levis Reading Prize, a Distinguished Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council, the Nebraska Book Award, and the Mari Sandoz Award from the Nebraska Library Association. Aizenberg is professor emerita of creative writing and English at Creighton University. She lives and writes in Iowa City, where she teaches in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
Kevin Bowman is an associate professor of art at Montgomery College in Takoma Park/Silver Spring, Maryland, where he teaches printmaking, two-dimensional design and drawing. Born and raised in Hartford City, Indiana, he earned his BFA in printmaking from Ball State University in 1994 followed by his MFA from the University of South Dakota in 2002. His work has been included in over eighty exhibitions and print portfolios.
These eleven poems were hand set by Minjung Goo, Gibraltar Editions 2020 Harry Duncan Letterpress Intern, and Denise Brady in Bembo types with Murray Hill title initials. The paper is Zerkall Book for text, Arches Cover, and variously colored endsheets made by hand from recycled fabrics. Accompanying the poems are three two-color linoleum cuts by Kevin Bowman. The book is bound using a non-adhesive visible long stitch. The edition is limited to ninety books, each one hand numbered.