Rituals for to Call Down Light by Amanda Rachelle Warren

These interlinked poems will set their hooks in you. “Take a pull from this bottle” Warren writes, “it won’t hurt long.” Set in an Appalachian river-town of floodgates and corn stalks, side yard fridges, clay grit, unmarked roads and Jesus, the speaker grapples with god and with the ghosts of a place both beautiful and cruel. Rituals for to Call Down Light casts its spell against darkness, not to banish it, but to find the light within it.

–Melissa Tuckey, author of Tenuous Chapel and editor of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Anthology

These poems explore the ritual of memory in the collective, the personal, and often traumatic. Here, we find the poet looking for a way to connect the constant rivers that run through the bramble and honeysuckle of this world to understand the cruelty and sublimity of both God and man, of both past and present, of both earth and waterway. And like rivers, here, “each wound is an old wound; each new song repeats the refrain of an older song which is never a lullaby.” And we are all victims to the drowning, or we’re saved by it as it washes us over and takes what it takes so that we might give. There is grace in these poems, there is reverence. And there is a light that can only be found if we are willing to search for it in the darkness. Truly, this is a stunning collection.

–Ray McManus – author of Punch. and The Last Saturday in America