Light at the End of the Word by Cheryl Pallant

Cheryl Pallant’s exuberance for life is barely contained in her surging lines made of luxurious wordplay, bravura wit and lithe music. A happy bodhisattva, Pallant just can’t quit life for Nirvana. In Light at the End of the Word her gorgeous, death-defying acrobatics are simply irresistible. She notices, thinks about, everything—intuiting life’s spark. Her realization of being alive materializes like an invisible inscription held over a candle’s flame—readable in turning to ash. Her motto: “Don’t apologize for beauty.” In honoring life’s fleeting nature, she possesses the gravity of its mortal register. Her confession: “What I most want to say folds into the forget of dreams.” Shaped by the grace of existence, her poems become our self-reflections.

—Burt Kimmelman

Cheryl Pallant invites you inside a briskly moving environment with “no sitting down” where ordeal can’t help turning to dance. Passing through unforeseen lingualities—zones of possible languaging—you find it thinkable to think otherwise. Instead of new solutions to old problems or analyses of past events, speaking works new ways of being. Light at the End of the Word is singular language shedding skin, revealing beyond understanding, with ever finer intensities—and laughter over fearful edges. Something like continuous subclinical startle puts reading under pressure, feels text as body in mind-therapeutic mode. Everything’s at stake on the tip of the tongue; you lose your way to find it newer, line by line, barely recognizable. Mirroring alters the looker. Reading finds its further selves in steps along precarious ways.

—George Quasha

“Resisting the path is a path” writes Cheryl Pallant. What does that path sound, feel and look like? Light at the End of the World creates a charged (mostly) long lined, breathed, loping, dancerly language that resists easy syntax, old stories and absolutely anything poetically predictable. “Our mission requires the emergence of impromptu faculty” writes the poet who is “susceptible to double vision/ and seeing what isn’t seeable” that is, “as if orcas and manta rays surface, as if a bathyscaphe plunges/ to aphotic depths seeking fluorescence.” Pallant’s poetry seeks connection “transducing passed the tympanic membrane” whilst continually registering the energy emitting materiality of one’s own body, the wounded other, and the conditions that “quicken cosmic connect/ to feral superfluity in full throttled resonance.”

—Kimberly Lyons

Cheryl Pallant is the author of several poetry books, Her Body Listening and Continental Drifts (Blaze VOX Books), Into Stillness and Uncommon Grammar Cloth (Station Hill Press), and Morphs (Cracked Slab Books). Her nonfiction books include Ecosomatics: Embodiment Practices for a World in Search of Healing (Inner Traditions), Writing and the Body in Motion: Awakening Voice through Somatic Practice and Contact Improvisation: an Introduction to a Vitalizing Dance Form (McFarland and Company), and Ginseng Tango (Big Table Publishing). She teaches dance and writing at University of Richmond and is a Reiki and Healing Touch practitioner.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 86 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-448-2