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THE CAFÉ AT LIGHT

by Mark McMorris

"Mark McMorris’ The Café at Light is a beautiful book of poetry about some very ordinary events. Making the normal shimmer exercises the philosophical mind that informs every page. The Café at Light respects the individuals too and makes us glad to know McMorris is out there linking past and present self and other in the most generous terms imaginable. Warning: The Surgeon General thinks this book may change you.The Café at Light is a beautiful and original book. Mark McMorris has a genuinely cosmopolitan imagination--one that moves musically, and with rapidity and insight, from intimacy to our citizenship in the world and back--and he continually invents poetic forms that are adequate to his remarkable extension of poetry's domain."
- Susan Stewart

"The Café at Light’s dazzlingly varied, inventive architecture fills it with delights and surprises even as it girds an emotional reserve, its dark matter. An appeal to light willing to forfeit consolation, it is a book of lyric accretion, a work of technical, philosophic and droll brilliance."
- Nathaniel Mackey

"These poems stretch the length of the imagination. Passages shimmer from first reading to re-reading; “names turn up” as sides of the same question appear in the open spaces, black and hand made."
- Erica Hunt

“. . . a poetic voice that is at once deeply engaged in an English poetic tradition, but not afraid to trouble the terms of its extended contract.”
- Publishers Weekly