Overview

"Reliving the overdoses of beloved friends, Malachi Black closes this book's opening poem with a resuscitating command: ""Doctor, / turn back. One of us lives."" Indirect Light is a testament to and apologia for this assertion of vitality, each eponymous poem an elegy dedicated to one of Black's dearly departed. Though this book mourns an irretrievable past, it wages war against amnesia, refusing to let death erase the vibrancy of their lives. These poems preserve ""the breath we left beside us on the train tracks,"" ""the watery inscriptions of nearby dogwood branches / dipped in shade,"" ""our bookbags' mouths / pouting open on our laps,"" ""our street-scabbed bodies / briefly tinseled in the sun."" Insofar as this collection returns to friends and kin to honor them by the indirect light of memory, it also seeks to memorialize the author's personal experience of adolescence and addiction amidst the opioid epidemic. It is a lament for all that's lost and a paean to the near misses and the just enough: a dim glow you can see by, a cup of coffee passed during NA, a prayer during detox to ""be // as empty / as the sky"" if floating means survival."

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9781961897120

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Reviews

"Here, as in a s�ance, Malachi Black calls forth spirits from a hazardous youth in the opioid- infected suburbs of New York City, a youth measured in lovers and users, in the early deaths of friends, in evenings spent in back-alleys, ""our spray-paint nicknames / glistening / in gold above the wilting / silhouettes of cardboard boxes."" These poems live so beautifully in the tension between the persistence of memory and the guilty present, between those who survive and those who are lost. Indirect Light is not a book about redemption; instead, it is a book about a more complicated grace that might arise from thought, memory, memorial, and art. Black's technical skill, his mastery of the music of poetry, is as breathtaking as the intelligence and feeling that live in these poems. --Kevin Prufer In Indirect Light, Malachi Black strikes a precarious balance between reminiscences of times past--many of them elegiac; it is a death-heavy book--and a strong poet's resistance to nostalgia. And he navigates that balance deftly throughout. What Black knows, what he seems to have always known, is that the successful lyric poem is anti-nostalgic, because nostalgia embalms, whereas the lyric poem, even the lyric poem about the dead beloved, sings lifeward. This is a book of great, life-making lyricism. Every word of Indirect Light sings. --Shane McCrae In Malachi Black's poems, you get the sense that every syllable and phrase has been tinkered and wrestled with in the attempt to make the language completely embody experience: tying off to shoot up, remembering the timbre of a dead friend's laughter, registering the exact look of a burned-out Ford sedan. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Black uses words not as symbolic referents but as sacramental presences capable of rendering the world in all its material density and spiritual nuance. --Tom Sleigh Reading Malachi Black's Indirect Light feels like being on the receiving end of Tennyson's In Memoriam shot through a many-prismed lens, as the intensity of the collection's longing reaches toward many persons, its grieving a flowering out. But Black's work here is not one of lyrical despondency. Rather, it is ingeniously narrative, providing intimate and tactile views into a generation--one in which the speaker of these poems finds himself lost, having lost those he loved. Reader, read hard into this book's center. Its narrative angle is complex, as are the poems' disparate formal ambitions. Is it not the purpose of the elegy to bring back our dead? Do we not long for their cruelly exciting company? Black's much-anticipated second book is a significant contribution to the ongoing tradition of the elegiac form. --Cate Marvin"

Author Information

Malachi Black is also the author of Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA's New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black's poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (Yale UP, 2013), The Poet's Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing [U.K.], 2016), and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence, 2023). Black's work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hawthornden Castle, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation (a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship), the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Yaddo. Black's poems have several times been set to music and have been featured in exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad, including recent and forthcoming translations into French, Dutch, Croatian, Slovenian, and Lithuanian. Black teaches at the University of San Diego and lives in California.

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