Light Reading

Light Reading, the first full-length poetry collection from poet, playwright, translator and editor Stephan Delbos, ranges from micro-minimalist poems to all-encompassing lyric declarations and metatextual litanies. The book’s first section, “Light Reading,” begins with an aubade and ends with a lullaby. In between, these short poems grapple with the marks words make on existence, exploring themes of language and memory, and confronting the work of poets and thinkers including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, John Milton, Jack Kerouac, William Bronk and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The second section of the book, “Bagatelles for Typewriter,” includes an elegy for Czech playwright and President Václav Havel, and poems inspired by the composers Philip Glass, György Ligeti and Johnny Rotten, among others. These open-ended lyrical narratives playfully explode the minimalist complexity of “Light Reading.” The book’s third section, “Arrangements,” is a series of creative directives for poetry that takes metatext to the max. Light Reading exhibits a startling formal range and a delightful eclecticism of poetic thought.