Layle Keane Chambers is a performing poet, author & educator from Folly Beach, SC. Professor Emeritus of Theatre with an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University. Her poetry has appeared in Collateral, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, The Things We Carry Still (Middle West Press), Proud To Be V. 13 (Southeast Missouri State University Press) and has won the Poetry Society of South Carolina’s Perception Prize. She also co-authored Glass: Gather. Engage. Give. with her best friend, Debby Gilbert. She is a proud Air Force mom. Connect with her online: Layle Keane Chambers, author (Facebook), @laylethewhale (Instagram), @laylekeanechambers (Substack)
PRAISE:
Layle Keane Chambers has written a book that pulses with devotion, distance, and deep witnessing. Caught in the Light is a mother’s reckoning with the impossible – the beauty and brutality of raising a child who takes flight into war. These poems hold fear, pride, grief, and love all at once. “You are flying / and that’s all I can ask” is a gorgeous way to express the ache of letting go while holding on.
–Marcus Amaker, first Poet Laureate of Charleston, SC, and member of the SC Literary Hall of Fame
A jet-stream of parental affections, memories, and fears generates a dream-like magic carpet ride that celebrates a life of service, intention, and flight. One sublime moment: “I wanted you to be a poet / you wanted to be a pilot // now it’s tomorrow / where you are / and I sit // by an ocean”.
–Randy “Sherpa” Brown, author of “Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire”
I feel as though I read Caught in the Light all in a single breath; it’s a dizzying account of following a son’s military flights all over the world, the accompanying anxiety, the strange intimacy of what a computer can offer a person at a great distance from a loved one. I don’t know of another series of poems that offers such heartbreaking insight into the minute-by-minute experience of a military parent.
–Jacqueline Osherow, author of Divine Ratios
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.