In their fourth full-length book of poetry, Pocketing the Light, Lee Desrosiers writes, “I am related to people who can sew / … who knit.” “All I have are words,” and yet how richly their words are stitched together! Generations of mothers and daughters, lovers and wives, weave through this collection, examining their roles, exchanging intimacies in language that is tender, unsentimental, and precise. Time and the natural world are characters in the narrative as well, delineating and shading life’s lessons. Pocketing the Light reminds us that every day of the “everyday” is something to be valued, to be held in our hands like a whorled seashell and admired. “Wrap your arms around my waist / … look at what may come,” invites Desrosiers. I was glad I accepted the invitation. —Don Hogle, author, Huddled in the Night Sky Pocketing the Light is a quiet, searching collection that turns inward, not to escape the world, but to remake it. In these poems, the speaker builds an inner landscape — tender, luminous, and governed by longing — where the lost return, the body is unburdened, and love can be summoned simply by thought. Yet this imagined refuge is never untouched by reality: time presses in, mortality echoes, and each act of “being born” carries the shadow of disappearance. —M.B. McLatchey, author, Smiling at the Executioner In Pocketing the Light, Lee Desrosiers’ poems ask what it means to inhabit a life that is always changing, a life that keeps asking us to name the things we lose in time: a mother’s voice, a father’s laughter, “grass / bowing” to its wildness. These poems move through meditations on illness and aging and move through beautiful observations of nature. “Nature is a balm to me even though / I don’t know the names of all the flowers,” Desrosiers writes, and this quiet confession becomes the emotional center of a book attentive to a living world we are part of and that holds us until we are ready to let go. —Octavio Quintanilla, author, The Book of Wounded Sparrows and Las Horas Imposibles
