A beautiful and timely collection of poems written during the pandemic.
 
The poems in Alice Attie’s new volume, Bending into the Light, are poised on an ever-shifting threshold where words “up and down, side to side” appear as “figures in the distance approaching, each a declaration, each persisting”. Beings, things, ideas, present or vanishing, flow through the vessel of language wherein each exudes “its own aura, its own being, its own disappearance.” Attie’s voice is intricate and intimate, shaping and reshaping the space of being and the space of non-being. These contemplative poems, interspersed with a few haunting photographs and artworks, extol, and mourn, melding the quotidian with the philosophical where we are formed and transformed in the profound knowledge that “the voice has no center.”
 
 

A collection of poems that explores transformation, dissolution, and renewal—and how language itself can become a site of regeneration.

The poems in Maybe form a tapestry of voices that slip from visibility to invisibility, illusion to disillusion, the conceivable to the inconceivable. Alice Attie writes of boundaries loosening, of transformations and transfigurations born of the unknown and the uncertain. Her poems suggest that this world will dissolve, and it will reappear as something other, something ineffable yet lodged in language, something fraught with an urgency that is both sublime and unbearable. Attie asks from what vantage point can the seer see, the writer write, the listener hear, learning ultimately that “for the length of my years to lengthen, I place the pebble on my tongue and rearrange the boundaries”?