Day of Clean Brightness
from 3: A Taos Press

 

“Tomorrow the morning sun will cast a maple’s shadow. Within it, an inverse silhouette of light.” Jane Lin’s Day of Clean Brightness is a moving, luminous book that singularizes mourning by using close attention, surprising details, and visionary edges.

—Arthur Sze, Compass Rose

Day of Clean Brightness reverberates with the knowledge that “sorrow (is) a song we all know the chorus to.” These poems are deeply rooted in both daily life and loss that “accrues like nacre around a damage point.” A vivid tapestry of long bouts of illness, the loss of family members, the neighbors or friends whom one visits in the hospital. These poems are made sharp with awareness that always “what follows is the daily life.” Jane Lin writes deeply and precisely of “The irreparable remnants. The wood, the spoon. The person restored to a functioning member of family.” These losses are not merely personal but ancestral, historical, true to inner experience. Here what remains—memory and love—gather in every room like “the whole (that) continues to draw voice from the string.”

—Rebecca Seiferle, Wild Tongue

 

Poems Available Online

• A Kind of Ars Poetica
• An Education in Letters
• approximate
• Breaking Point
• Ecostation for Disposal and Recycling
• Having Said I Would Never Speak to the Dead
• Monthly Spotlight in Duende: Two Poems
• Two Poems: Tayo Literary Magazine
• Untitled, An Excerpt

For Purchase

• Day of Clean Brightness available for purchase from 3: A Taos Press and Amazon.com
• Speak No Evil – Winter 2014 issue of Asian American Literary Review.  3-poem portfolio.
• The Renga Project – A collaborative renga project organized by Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis and Axle Contemporary. Each stanza was written by a different poet and illustrated by a different local artist. My stanza is fantastically illustrated by Jeff Benham.
• “Signs and Portents”  (The Santa Fe Songs: No. 3) on Talise Trevigne’s album At the Statue of Venus