“This book is a song: a rolling, rollicking dialogue with emerging selves as they take their place among a textured female lineage, confirming a “world-blown pregnancy.” In poems that move from the ecological to the erotic, Leahy and Schwartz re-wild the feminine, invoking the divine while grounding themselves firmly in the work of the body: “what if goddess is the in. The way through. // Relationship itself.” As the book builds a kind of generative path towards grace, where mythic ancestors (Gaia) converse with modern counterparts (Virginia Woolf), what’s exposed are deeply moving meditations—on cancer survival, on motherhood and the return of the prodigal daughter, on the regenerative properties of joy—guiding the reader to profound and unexpected places.”
–Joe Pan, author of Operating Systems
“In Krista J.H. Leahy and Barbara Schwartz’s Nothing But Light, the Feminine Divine has been brought out from under the dustcover of myth and wrenched into vibrant life. These poems celebrate pleasure, creation, collaboration, a span of traditions, the life cycle entire. Wisdom holds hands with humor and with darkness here: the book is sure to awaken its readers, devout or doubting, with its multiple voices, its shimmering images, its profound explorations.”
–Kathleen Ossip, author of July
“I admire this collaborative collection for its intensity, its formal rigor, and for the many worlds it reveals as it negotiates the space between language, the body, and the divine. Here is a poetry that does not stand still as it powers its way through the propulsive rhythms of time.”
–Daniel Borzutsky, author of The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the 2016 National Book Award.
“I’m compelled by the vulnerability of these collaborative poems, how they powerfully articulate bodily experiences: the erotic, childbirth, a cancer diagnosis, chemo, miscarriage: “My blood has dried out / I write with air.” The poets pay unusual attention to the divine, writing poems that are a form of prayer (sometimes irreverent), as they invoke and invent a pantheon of female deities, drawing from Judeo-Christian and world mythology. Ruminating on mortality, they memorably ask, “What matters the temporary / Habit of skin and bones?”
–Rachel Galvin, Elevated Threat Level (finalist National Poetry Series, Alice James Books’ Kinereth Gensler Award)