Bone Light Orlando White. Red Hen (CDC, dist.) $15.95 (64p) ISBN 978-1-59709-135-0
Orlando White’s Bone Light recreates poetry from the molecular level. His vision presents language letter by letter: as body, as recipe, as originary myth, as admonition. Here, poetry moves stealthily through the smallest increments, in the “pause between ink and letter when words are silent, unclothed.” In that bare space, poems keep time through their own arcane measure and the reader sees a “human clock” emerge, one whose face is as much halo as empty zero. This astonishing writing dissects language with surgical and magical precision. White peels back our assumptions like a skin and gives us the irradiated, irreducible light of the bone.