Suzanne Langlois's chapbook Bright Glint Gone is the winner of the 2019 Maine Chapbook Series, selected by award-winning poet Martha Collins. Collins writes, "Reading through Bright Glint Gone for the first time, I was delighted by the unexpected ways of perceiving the familiar, the surprising turns of language, the delicate balance of humor and wisdom. The pleasure only deepened on re-reading."
This collection centers around connection and separateness, both the desire for and the fear of intimacy. It engages the borders where living souls rub against each other, whether they're skin or fur or shell or soil, and explores how the friction at these contact points causes both pleasure and pain. The poems explore the risks inherent in loving any creature that lives in a body, as all bodies are subject to aging and eventual annihilation, whether due to natural processes or climate crisis.
"The poems of "Bright Glint Gone" are so smart, dry, heartbreaking, and...wonderfully readable. From the first poem to the last, this collection moves without a hitch. The reader wants to keep going because the poems are so accessible, which is not to say that they are not challenging. Indeed, these poems are immensely complicated in their tackling of the big subjects of love, loss, loneliness, and despair. A few lines: '...The night starts with a flame / that fills in the palm of a hand / like a wine glass / and ends in a forest fire.' Throughout her use of imagery and figure is superb, and, in the end, that's what it all boils down to -- a poet in control of her craft. Here, one of my (many) favorite moments: 'He is a fistful of gravel thrown at my bedroom window-' Vivid, exciting, original." -Martha Rhodes
"When Mary Ruefle says that good poetry is 'a bridge that...breaks isolation and loneliness without eradicating it, ' she could have had Zanne Langlois's Bright Glint Gone foremost in her mind. There's heartbreak in this book like 'an open grave in my chest, ' and remorse beside it like 'smoke rising from a chimney.' There's disappointment too, and longing like 'an itch in the middle of my back, / right where the zipper would end.' Langlois's gift is the gift of voice, and the gift of voice is the gift of character-a gift that has never been more important in America than now. This funny and sad debut of lyric meditations thinking on and feeling through the self's search for its most authentic solo manifestation will remind you of that and bring you real com