The Light Most Glad of All

In this luminous, whirling collection of poems, love is portal, birdsong, punk rock riff, angel, masquerade, prayer, the very wind stream of life. This is the poetry of ecstasy-riotous and intoxicated as orchard blossoms, that reaches wildly and-through all the senses of the body, though language, "to touch the beautiful in us that can never change." Open this book with gladness-and let the great light in.

-Robert Fanning, author of Severance, Our Sudden Museum, American Prophet, and The Seed Thieves

Who are Ken Meisel's readers? Tender lovers of Echo Park, perhaps angels who have slipped from heaven to the dark golden sand of Venice Beach to "all this deep impermanence and emptiness." The poems in this collection awaken the Gazer within and without, as if these poems' mission were to teach its reader how to look. Do his readers secret his volumes in their inner pockets? Lay themselves down on lines like "Not humans. Just dogs/& when she stands, now, in the mirror, mixing/the soap to cleanse her fragile, magazine face." Ken Meisel writes of crazy dramas of the heart, and I love his poem, "Monique Jean," and the dogs, so many dogs lounging at her feet in the power of tenderness. And what I dearly love about this book is this quality of recurring tenderness-and the search for it, like a pearl necklace he once lost: This book's poems speak to all the mysteries that surround love: "like a fragment of a petal, a part." The Light Most Glad of All revels in a humanness rarely found in verse: it offers to us a poet lost in thought, "and feeding the small, irritated birds/that sorted and darted there to the lake, to land in it like soft, /feathered dragon lizards or angels."

-Russell Thorburn, author of Let It Be Told in a Single Breath

The Light Most Glad of All is a book about love, delight, spirits, time, angels, immortality, space, marriage, and the cosmos. This is metaphysical poetry where Ken Meisel tries to reach/touch/explain what is beyond human perception. Poems like "Delight" and "Sunday Morning Prayer" will enthrall you. Full of intense figurative language and personal myth-making, Meisel takes you on a ride into an internal landscape where "sacred memory is what awakens in the petals,/in one another too, whenever we give life to love."

-David James, author of Alive in Your Skin While You Still Own It