GATHERING BROKEN LIGHT

Praise for GATHERING BROKEN LIGHT

Let us not forget. Poetry can help us to fulfill that admonition. In the tradition of such testaments as Chris Llewellyn’s Fragments from the Fire, remembering the garment workers killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, and Valerie Martínez’s Each and Her, remembering the hundreds of women and girls murdered in Ciudad Juaréz, Heather Lang-Cassera’s Gathering Broken Light remembers to us those killed, those injured, those aggrieved in the 1 October 2017 shooting in Las Vegas. These poems attend to detail: “the abandoned napkin is a collapsed cloud”; “A trampled cup is a deserted snow globe”; “The aluminum can is a failing telescope.”  Such careful observation of what was left behind is remembrance of what was taken away. Heather Lang-Cassera’s “alphabet of grief” makes Gathering Broken Light one quiet, wise way of “confronting / pasts we cannot understand.”

—H. L. Hix, author of Rain Inscription ​

With the exquisite control of evocative language and the brilliant use of repetition, the intimacy of Gathering Broken Light mirrors the persistence of trauma and resilience. Lang-Cassara guides us through the deepest rooms of grief, both collective and personal, with both stunning and haunting attention to image—“one before the summoning of ghosts, / one before the faces washed pale by floodlights, / one before the eyes wider than the mouths / of oh, holy night.” This lyrical engagement with loss laces together the fragmented and unanswerable questions a community contends with when recovering from a tragedy with such harrowing effects as the October 1 mass shooting. I felt invited to bring my own ache to a collection that renders the reader captivated with a tension and a longing so deeply felt and known that it becomes an offering to both the bereaved and a beloved city, which shimmers, even as it breaks, with belonging.

—Jennifer Battisti, author of Off Boulder Highway

Heather Lang-Cassera’s Gathering Broken Light is an extended meditation on the shattering legacies of American gun violence. Dedicated to the victims and survivors of the October 1 mass shooting in Las Vegas, Gathering Broken Light grapples with the unspeakable. In lyric, light-infused poems evoking the dramatic beauty of the Mojave Desert, Lang-Cassera repeatedly confronts language’s limitations to represent trauma—“these metaphors attempt to dissociate / or to try to understand, / but nothing in between” or “I took words & placed them on my tongue, / a quiet catapult for what / I cannot say”—while still, nonetheless, insisting on the reparative linguistic rituals of elegy. The untitled poems seamlessly flow from one to another: ekphrastic poems glaze random discarded objects documented in Getty news photographs of the shooting with heartbreakingly tender attention, while recurring poems beginning with the words “in an alphabet of grief” attempt to articulate a lexicon of trauma. Gathering Broken Light is a gorgeous canticle that powerfully catalogues personal and collective griefs within a ruptured and rupturing world.

—Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50

Award Nominations for GATHERING BROKEN LIGHT

• ​Push Cart 

• Lambdas 

• National Indie Excellence Award

• Next Generation Indie Book Award

• Independent Press Award

• IPPY Award

• Forward INDIES Award

• Julie Suk Award

• Eric Hoffer Award

• Stonewall Book Awards

• Norma Faber

• Balcones Poetry Prize

• Poetry Society of Virginia North American Book Award

• 32nd Annual Reading the West Book Award

• 2022 WILLA Literary Award

• Four Quartets Prize

In the MEDIA

About HEATHER LANG-CASSERA

Heather Lang-Cassera is an author and ceramist. She was awarded a 2022 Nevada Arts Council Literary Arts Fellowship, served as the 2019-2021 Clark County, Nevada Poet Laureate, and was named 2017 Best Local Writer or Poet by the readers of Nevada Public Radio's Desert Companion. Heather teaches creative writing with Nevada State University where she serves as a faculty advisor for 300 Days of Sun. She also serves as the Poetry Editor for Black Fox Literary Magazine, as an Editor with Tolsun Books, and as a Studio Assistant with Clay Arts Vegas where she teaches hand-building classes. Her previous collection, Gathering Broken Light (Unsolicited Press, 2021), was written with the support of a Nevada Arts Council Project Grant for Artists, was named a Distinguished Favorite by the Independent Press Awards, and won the NYC Big Book Award in Poetry, Social/Political. She is also the author of the micro-collection Where Hunger Must Be Feral (rinky dink press, 2023) and the chapbook I was the girl with the moon-shaped face (Zeitgeist Press, 2018).