Light Here, Light There

• Light Here, Light There
• Price: $14.95
• Tradepaper, 6x9 inches, 80 pages
• ISBN 10: 0-9815010-6-0
• ISBN 13: 978-0-9815010-6-2
• February 2009

“In Light Here, Light There, his second collection, Alexander Long crafts prose poems with sharp tools to contain the contradictions of love and memory, loss and promise. The poems are peopled by family, jazzmen, soldiers, poets, lovers, friends, and working people of all kinds. The living and the ghosts of the dead jostle one another in bars and laundromats, at the beach, on city streets and in feverish dreams. In a group of meditations on the suicide of a childhood friend, Long tests the limits of loss and grief in poems that are at once heartbreaking and touched with possibility. Long is an original.”
—Marie Harris, author of Weasel in the Turkey Pen

“The poems in Alexander Long’s Light Here, Light There offer no bromides, no easy consolations. His new book is a product of ‘the grieving mind in memory,’ and Long seems to have forgotten nothing. The misery of a failed marriage, a friend’s suicide, and the casual ruin of other wasted lives are cataloged with a ruthless precision. But ‘every apocalypse is personal,’ Long assures us, and because it is, we readers experience the same redemption that Long somehow manages to coax out of the relentless assault of the past. Alexander Long’s poems are superbly lyrical, agile and flamboyant. His description of Jimi Hendrix in one of his poems is an apt description of Long as well: ‘wicked and bright and on.'”
—Gary Young, author of Hands