Bright Power, Dark Peace

In Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito's Bright Power, Dark Peace, readers are guided through the ruins of a city, and perhaps a society. The old grandeur of its bones is evoked in bright lariats of image. It is a city where hyacinths unfold themselves from the corpses of the old world into a blinding and beautiful white. Where the old windows are filled with "bolts of chenille and empty bobbins" and where you can still hear the voices singing from the empty theater. In this exquisite collaboration, from the ruins are the possibilities. From the unsalvageable, what will save. The magic of Saito and Brimhall's lyricism returns what was thought to be lost into what is, for certain, miraculous. --Oliver de la Paz Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), winner the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (SIU Press, 2010), winner of the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the King/Chávez/Parks Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brynn Saito is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press (March, 2013). Her poetry has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared or is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and Pleiades. She is the recipient of a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship and the Key West Literary Seminar’s Scotti Merrill Memorial Award. Brynn was born and raised in the Central Valley of California and currently lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.