Poetry
ISBN 978-1-957746-03-6
p.87
 
Grounded in the landscapes of Indiana and the midwest region, WHERE THE LIGHT FEEDS is a lyric meditation on ecology, elegy, heartache, and homecoming. Formally and substantively, these poems insist that patient attention—to the world, each other, and language–enacts the kind of faith that helps people stay. Across these poems, a lyric I and lyric you move through regional geographies and inner terrains of memory, grief, and fear—ever in search of a softer ontology. With a sharpening focus on language and image, the poems in this collection usher their inhabitants into a more inhabitable world.
 
PRAISE FOR WHERE THE LIGHT FEEDS:
 
"How does one find the faith one can have faith in? Look up into the answerless sky and see what the in their winging prophesize—. Let the ancient elements of water and wind and light play god—. That most ancient of anxieties sounds its drone in the blank beneath the words of Susannah Lodge-Rigal’s astonishing and astonished debut. Astonishing because the poems, in singularly etched lines of lyric honesty, teach us to seek the world they also seek; astonished because they suffer the world they find. It’s a strange and lovely way of being that unfolds in these pages. Moving from the want of any omen that might say what is to come, to the fretful hope that a poem could catch the world it names, 'an ocean / no more certain than a word,' and a word not certain at all. But song can make of itself its own home, 'the hum you’re living now,' wordless tune that worlds us, so we can arrive in our days 'more human / than we’d hoped.' Where the Light Feeds is no book of prophecy—it is better than that. It is a book of the hours becoming ours, a book of the minutes in which love manifests, a book teaches us to say what it learns to sing: 'thank you for the luck.'" Dan Beachy-Quick
 
 
"Maybe in English there really is only one single word for sky—a fact these poems contemplate and honor with deep attention. Yet, Susannah Lodge-Rigal’s faithful, sonic, and steady caesura adds to our lexicon a gesture that offers itself up as synonym. In such pauses, hewn and hued and near-endless, Lodge-Rigal renders expansive how we can keep calling by the same names what is is: care, sky, light, bird, you. Here we find “what quiet // makes on the underside of breathing” and in that quiet Where the Light Feeds arrives—an utterly beautiful book. Page after page a record of where where poems rescue, hum the landscape. Their lines sing to the horizon always in sight, to a you somewhere listening." Monica Berlin
 
 
SUSANNAH LODGE-RIGAL is a poet and educator based in Berkeley, California. Raised in Bloomington, Indiana, she received a B.A. from Knox College and M.F.A. from Colorado State University, where she was awarded the 2019 Academy of American Poets University Prize. Susannah's work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Seneca Review, and elsewhere.