Links to reviews:  Local iQ & The Kenyon Review

As a Diné poet who draws on Native perspectives of time and space to create poems that nimbly navigate between absence and presence, silence and words, Orlando White makes the white of a page a coffin but also a door. Here is a poetry that makes its intense focus on language a visceral experience. Bone Light is a marvelous debut.

-Arthur Sze, author of The Ginkgo Light

Orlando White's poetry glimmers with Diné notions of “thought creating thought” while re-configuring saad (language) into floating archipelagos of states which mutate into flashes of images that compel and startle. His work then peels forth a new perception of what language might be if we eliminate our own desires to maintain stasis in a changed world. Bone Light is an occasion marking the illumination of the body’s silence, the blank areas in which our breathing shadows the stains of letters punched onto the surface of a blank page, where the poet pages back a blank sound, filling it with the “open dark”  as he  “amputates one letter to fix another” so that we too may be changed in act of the recoding of language.

-Sherwin Bitsui, author of Flood Song

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.

-Elizabeth Robinson, author of The Orphan & Its Relations

"Everything I write requires this: Alphabet." A child sees letters first, "shape distinguishing itself from its background," but soon we lose the innocence of that first encounter to ideas of sound, sequence, and sense, some fixed order separating right from wrong. In this debut, White, a Diné (Navajo), never gives up the innocence of the icons: the stars he saw in his rattled head took the shape of the Alphabet, and "years later, my fascination for letters resulted in poems." White tries to remain true to the core, the bones, of language. His hope is to explore an indigenous thought that has been corrupted by the cultural, intellectual, and social threat that English has imposed. He thus experiments with line, space, and syntax: "A man in a black suit with a zero/ for a head follows me. He carries a gun/ shaped like language; wants me written/ and dead on the page." Such original, and even daring, ideas are clearly not intended for every reader and not meant for every collection, but for those who are up to the challenge, White's poetry will provide a curious twist.

-Library Journal

Language can be an intriguing subject, and author Orlando White explores the language we speak every day, English. Bone Light is his discussion through verse of the subject, exploring the nuances and treating English as if it were a foreign language in concept. A unique idea and excellently executed, Bone Light is a solid choice for a book of poetry. "Bone Milk": Write the O/Dip skull/into bleach./Press the letter./Bones soften/into calcium./Smear a zero./Hair dissolves/into ink./Erase paper./Skin evaporates/into foam./Boil subject/and verb;/condense/into liquid./Fade from dark,/the shade of milk./Suck out period./Tooth heats/into fluid./Now pour skeleton/into another skin.

-Midwest Book Review

Other Links:  The IAIA Chronicle & The Santa Fe Reporter

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