The solstice always means something about darkness and light—one coming, one leaving. The tragicomedy, of course, being that by the time we get to a solstice we are at the height of the tipping point between the two. In this sense, we are always navigating polarity when we talk about solstices. We are talking about how light does not exist without dark, and dark without light, and that their stories are, of course, meaningfully entwined. They are both two sides of the same coin, and different manifestations of one another.
Speaking of manifestations of light and dark, I know I am not alone in spending a good deal of my time this year thinking about poetry’s place in the world we’re in, always more unfathomable than the world we were in a year ago, a month ago, a week ago. I know I am not alone in this consideration because poetry’s place in history tells me this (the cohabitation of poetry and the atomic bomb, poetry and the AIDS crisis, poetry and the October Revolution of 1917). I know I am not alone in this because when I search for the word “light” in this issue’s selection of poems, it appears 23 times: Farid Matuk’s “self-same light,” the watchers in Candice Kelsey’s poem who “watch the blue light bleed out,” those who burn “themselves alive for light” in Erik Armstrong’s piece, George Franklin’s “light bringer,” all the implied light in Fulla Abdul-Jabbar’s sky blue room. Diane Glancy’s poem alone contains six uses of the word, each time differently.
What drew me to these poems, consciously or unconsciously, was not the declaration of light and dark, the connection a symbol for how we make sense out of a senseless world, no. Rather, it is the collective responses to light; the people and worlds of these poems bring light into themselves, endure with and without it, suffer and thrall in its excess, verb and noun and adjective. We cannot live without light. We cannot understand the practice of light without dark. We can, however, find ourselves here, with the sage imperative from Gunilla T. Kester’s, “To Play J.S. Bach, ‘Fugue in C,’” which could very well be telling us what use poetry has for us right now: “better to go light! Never know what you’ll meet.”
–July Westhale
Poet and translator July Westhale was born in the American Southwest. Their books include moon moon, Trailer Trash, Unmade Hearts, and Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called “stunning” in a starred review. Ocean Vuong chose Westhale as the 2018 University of Arizona Poetry Center Fellow. Their translation of the Chilean poet Rolando Cardenas’ collected works was selected for the 2026 Unsung Masters Series (forthcoming from Pleiades Press). They have work in McSweeney’s, DIAGRAM, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Huffington Post, among others. July is represented by Carolyn Forde at Transatlantic and lives in Tucson, where they are adapting their novel to film.
www.julywesthale.co
