Otherlight

Jill Mceldowney's Otherlight plunges us into the rarefied limbo of grief. Suspended in time, in action, in ice, its speaker is halfway out the door of this world-is half-turned to follow the beloved who hovers, conjured, just at the edges of these pages. Otherlight's iconoclasm is arresting and terrifying; it rejects the advances of a world that refuses to understand that sometimes the past is a mine we never want to be hauled from. In these lyrical, annihilating poems, Mceldowney shows us how a life can be utterly derailed by a death; how even after a lightning-struck past, choosing to stay alive can be the biggest risk of all.

-Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater and Wilder

Otherlight beams its lantern light from the mouth of a cavernous grief. As we descend, Jill Mceldowney guides us through a liminal space only the loss of a beloved can forge, a world where the past and future continually collapse and distort, a purgatory of questions, a guilt that is '-terrible to survive / and surviving is never over.' These poems are raw as an exposed nerve in their exploration of addiction and precise in their portrayal of the jagged contours of depression: 'I pretend like I'm living.' There are 'rivers that children wade into / and do not return from as children,' insomniac nights that stretch into endless days. But this collection is also proof that there is power in naming the beast, even if it can't be tamed, even if its teeth are still bared." 

-Ruth Awad, author of Set to Music a Wildfire