Porch Light by Katy Keffer

Katy Keffer’s captivating debut Porch Light explores the spaces between love, longing, and natural beauty with playful structures that cumulatively feel like an intimate love letter to her Bluegrass childhood and beyond. A delightful collection beginning to end.

—Kali White VanBaale, author of The Monsters We Make and The Good Divide

Katy Keffer’s collection of poems, Porch Light, is both grounded in her love of her native Kentucky and soaring high among birds and butterflies. Keffer makes clever use of lettering to simulate motion for the ROLLerCOASTers in “Red Caboose” and “Let’s Fly.” The details she shares from childhood memories are both specific and rich in sensory experience: in “Blackberries” she remembers how “on tiptoes my five fingers grabbed their prize” and in “Her Name was Percy Shades” she recalls the “feather-comforter covered bed where slumber arrived under thunder’s rumbling lullaby.” Ordinary events like snow days and outings in the family car shimmer with loveliness. Keffer writes not just of the past, but of growth: “crumbly layers humming/with busy ants and jelly-brown worms; you/forge a new pathway.” This optimistic, hopeful, loving volume invites readers to the front porch to celebrate life: “picture-perfect pocket/breath in open yawn/the porch light on/always, for you.”

—Heather Bartos has been published in The Tiny Journal, Arboreal, McNeese Review, The Baltimore Review, and The Closed Eye Open, among other publications. She is pursuing her MFA at the University of New Orleans.