Indirect Light

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.

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.