Light in Our Houses

Remarkable for their dark, sharp wit, their stylistic unity, and their combination of sweetness and risk, the poems in The Light in Our Houses probe the intersection of public and private history, and visit the way stories are told: "what we have named history / was once only the braided rivers / of people's lives, currents that brimmed / fast and dangerous, then emptied / into the wide blank spill of ocean." Voicing a disdain for conclusions -- "the gaudy clothes we wrap narrative in" -- Al Maginnes writes poems that carry the weight of parables.