Standing in Old Light

"Matthew Porubsky's Stand in Old Light will "hover / heart-like" with me for a long time. My immediate reverence for these poems almost startled me, as the experience of reading them reminded me of the first time I fell in love with poetry, with Whitman years ago. This book is also a song of the self, an introspective travelogue asking questions ("How can the clouds appear as one?") and offering insights ("We are a nature collage") about our world. It's hard not to feel grateful to be alive when a simple loaf of bread is reframed as "having the sun on a cutting board." This book is aptly named - it absolutely shimmers with light."

- Melissa Fite Johnson, author of Midlife Abecedarian

"Stand in Old Light reads like a personal meditation. There's a razor-like quality to Porubsky's voice, which is remarkably consistent page after page. With only asterisks as titles, his line and stanza breaks hone the blade of seeing into the scalpel of knowing. As in zazen, the poet cuts away the fat of imagery to discover what he knows about wind and sun and living things, what he knows about love and family and endurance. Stand in Old Light is bright and lyrical, lean and muscled, gentle and nurturing. It is a pilgrimage pressed "forty days to one.""

- Al Ortolani, author of Hansel and Gretel Get the Word on the Street and Controlled Burn

"How can the horizon be so many lines?" Porubsky asks early in Stand in Old Light. This is more than just a question, of course: it is observation, statement, and prediction. As with so many of Porubsky's verses, more is happening, and before his book closes, we will encounter - see, hear, smell - smoke, ash, secrets, swords, and stars. Old light, yes, but new skin. New doors. There will be lines that "conjure the aroma of lilies" and "laugh like sun on water." His lines are exact and just where they need to be: "not unlike the stairs - / in stillness, each step lead[ing] / where it must." The answer is always in the distance: "Standing back / you can see how it all works together. / How it pulses."

This is a collection to look forward to and look back on - again and again.

- Jeff Tigchelaar, author of Certain Streets at an Uncertain Hour