The Quickening Light

In The Quickening Light, you find reverence and meditation, also hunger and

hard truth. Blumenson's subjects range from the natural world to solitude to family,

to the challenges of war and loss and the shiftings of the body. All this explored with

a fine eye for both praise and mourning, and a quest to open up the hidden, to "honor

the empty spaces like wolves that keep a place in the circle for those who are gone."

She tells it like it is, shoots us to the stars and delivers a heart that enlarges our world.

-Diane Jarvenpa, The Way She Told Her Story



Blumenson expands the familiar aphorism-where you look determines what

you see-in her title poem, "It's a matter/of how I choose to see/the world in the

quickening light." These intimate poems invite the reader in as she dances the tango;

embraces womanhood; and walks through the woods "stealing apples." Readers will

be prompted to consider similar "sights." Be ready for your own quickening.

-Ted Bowman, The Wind Blows, The Ice Breaks



The Quickening Light, June Blumenson's collection of new poems, is written with

"a love that sometimes walks on water...." There's a hardness in her work that is

strengthened, paradoxically, by a plaintive aura as well as humor...." in a world's

"unquenchable appetite for sorrow." Would that we all could express our lives as

intimately and artfully. "I want to go on/forever like a comet of light...," Blumenson

writes. The poems offer this comet to us all.

-Sharon Chmielarz, Speaking in Riddles



In Blumenson's exquisite second collection of poems, The Quickening Light, we make

our "solitary way" through a "world at large." Exiled from "the delicious garden,"

there is an urgency in these poems to reconcile our "imperfect world." "Ask me if I would

do everything again?" she writes and tells us, "...I have shed/enough tears to wash me

out/beyond the sea somewhere/and burst the seams of life again."

-Tim Nolan, Lines