Description
Red Lanterns is a collection of new poetry that navigates a borderland between the seen world and the spirit world.
Occupying a tangible world is expected of us humans. We have been taught to trust (and trust only) our five major senses, which inform the tangible. Humans, however, possess senses beyond our primary ones, not simply the sixth sense of intuition but also a sense of time, sense of responsibility, sense of being watched, and so on. Some things lie beyond the realm of human knowledge, some things are not as they appear, some places that appear empty may not be, and some things remain wild, secret, and intangible.
These poems look at the place where the wild and mysterious joins with the explicable. The poems are about connections, especially spiritual connections – human to human, human to animal, human to land, animal to animal. Many of the poems can be classified as love poems, because love is one of our most primal connections.
There is also a thread of fierceness that runs through this work. This ferocity is in seeing disconnection and fighting to restore connectivity. More than anything the book is a manifesto to protect all the connections that allow us to be creatures of spirit as much as creatures of what Flannery O’Connor called “weight and extension,” meaning of the body.
Praise for Red Lanterns
Anyone who knows the masterful beauty of Janisse Ray’s nonfiction will not be surprised to find that her heart lies with poetry. More than any poet I can think of, Janisse Ray gently prods us, through the beauty of her imagery and language, to open our eyes to the wonders of the natural world and to our purpose and place in it. This book is nothing short of a great blessing.
—David Bottoms, author of Otherworld, Underworld, Prayer Porch
With great and rare heart, Red Lanterns sings as it speaks with soil, grit, and an integrity of vision and practice—I love the poems in this book.
—Thorpe Moeckel, author of Down by the Eno, Down by the Haw
Before you open Red Lanterns, Janisse Ray’s new book of poems, be prepared to encounter a cornucopia of life inhabiting open land, day creatures and night creatures, all presented seamlessly intertwined in her poems with human experience. Ray has the rare talent of melding herself with the sounds and motions, the insistent, conflicting mayhem of the life and weather around and within her. Red Lanterns is an evocative and lyrical feast of language indeed.
—Pattiann Rogers, author of Quickening Fields
Janisse Ray says My heart is a culvert in this debut collection of poems, drawn from the past and present—through which internal waters run crystalline, jubilant like a sudden red bloom of cardinal in the dooryard quince, or turbid and fierce in the overflow of storm.
—Sean Sexton, author of May Darkness Restore
In the glow of Red Lanterns, sicklefin redhorse and river trout shine like raw jewels left, miraculously, to adorn the earth rather than cover our exposed necks. In their light, we see power and vulnerability differently. These poems commune in our shared grievances even as they gather papery red seedpods into wide open hands and offer them up like a heart.
—Amy Wright, author of Everything in the Universe
