Light Bearing

Poetry. "Heather Woods is a lightning rod; her poems abundant with the evanescent, sensual pleasures of God and spirit in this remarkable, transformative first collection. 'May all beings be full of light and the roots of light,' she writes, a modern mystic who acts as both a receiver and transmitter of radiance. This is a holy book of the highest order."—D. A. Powell

"Somebody shook, then popped the lid on, the Great Hymnal: out flew these devotional lyrics wholly recast—ravenously tender, carnally transcendent, and fearlessly pitched towards ecstasy. Heather Woods reawakens a tradition that Dickinson, George Herbert, H. D. inhabited, whereby the poet constructs a void of self as an act of seduction, a surrender to language that is also a command of sonority and syntax. Light bearing calls down the powers holily and hotly; it filled "me up such// that my seams would burst."—Aaron Shurin