How Light Reaches Us

Kristin Berger's How Light Reaches Us is a finely woven, image-rich exploration of self and landscape that gets to the very core of what poetry is about: language borrowed from the land, yet language of a voice so true that there could be none other. Berger's language, then, is both lovely and lucid, leading us to "that sharp time of sage / blooming from my skirts," to the deep knowledge of place found only by keen understanding and her even keener pen. In reading her book, we can't help but become our own wardens of the land because her lyric is so sure, creating in us not just the "proof," as she writes, but the necessary yearning "of this strange love / loping the steppe like hunger." It's a hunger nourished throughout the book but not sated until the last fine poem. It's a hunger we need.

-Simmons Buntin, Editor-in-Chief, Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments



"Slip out of the main stem of the world," begins Kristin Berger's poem "Oxbrow." "Detour," it lures. This is the journey How Light Reaches Us takes us on: into our rapturous interior, revealed through the penetrating gaze of landscape. To be included among these poems is a kind of worship. They reach like great redwoods steeped in season, time and sky. My own animal ache is more vivid and vast as I stand in this glade of interstitial light.

-Sage Cohen, Author, Fierce on the Page and Like the Heart, the World: Poems