In “If the War Doesn’t Go Fast Enough, Plant Flowers,” Debbie Hall concludes, “I am not sure where hope resides in the brain.” It is the considered honesty of a woman who has devoted her life to studying the minds of people, to seeking, through empathy and intense, almost obsessive attention, to crack the complexities of the mind, and who now has grudgingly resigned herself to the mysteries of the unknowable things in life. It is this same care for attention that she brings to her poems in What Light I Have, poems that reflect on her patients, her family, her life as a woman and traveler during her years in this world. It is the kind of intense scrutiny that demands release, which she finds in language, in poems that discover beauty in the known and unknowable worlds. In the end, even as she demonstrates her deep-seated belief that “every creature does its part/ for the others” it is the power of mystery and fantasy that undergirds her desire: “I’d like to depart this earth/ on the muscled shoulders/ of black-feathered angels/to be buried in the sky.” Here is an auspicious and generous debut by a poet of immense promise.
~Kwame Dawes, author of City of Bones: A Testament (Northwestern, 2017)
