The work of the poet is one of reassessment: it’s a continual look at the intricacies and minutiae of a world outfitted with a voluminous gadgetry of words. Poems, at best, are samplings of larger pieces of a broad experience. They reveal the urge to speak with an authoritative voice through the systems of language. Orlando White’s debut book of poetry, Bone Light, delves beyond instinct and intellect, utterance and music, letters and numbers. It is poetry that scrutinizes language and syntax with ginger strokes of forceful questioning.
The tone of the book is established in the first poem, “Everything I write requires this: Alphabet.”
White situates his poems squarely between the breaches of narrative and its decisive uses, and a fractured landscape of words and lines. What follows through the remaining 32 poems is a book that explores—at times riffles—the poet’s own boundaries as a writer.
Throughout Bone Light there are consistent literal and figurative “skeletal” allusions and references to bones transforming into language itself, establishing an expository source for the poems. Thematically, these images anchor the reader to the poems that are markedly individual, both in style and content, but fit it well as a series. What edges on the repetitive, perhaps slight overuse of such imagery, is ultimately curved by a tenacious exploration of “subject” that consequentially leads to each poem starting the conversation anew. Poems such as “From Skin to Bone,” “Skeleton” and “Blank Skull,” reiterate the relevance of the passage of time and memory as a way of shaping and reconciling the past.
“Sentence,” a poem that includes lines, “Letters can appear as bones,” followed by the parenthetical, “Do not forget the image,” and the conclusion, “If you write with calcium,” introduces the reader to White’s spare lines and playfully applied syntax, while never straying too far into abstraction. This and other poems, including a series of five that explore and meditate on the letters “i” and “j,” suggest that the disjointed line allow for a closer representation of its subject rather than more laborious sentences that are tirelessly shaped into grammatical sense. In other words, the poems of Bone Light are un-forced and un-patterned. They are stylistically risky and refreshingly non-committal to form and tradition, but engage the reader fully.
Ultimately, Bone Light is a map of the poet’s life, where the entireties of White’s experiences are revealed at once. It is a body filled with nuance, discovery and movement. Its poems are challenging, void or irrelevant obscurities and remain welcoming throughout their remarkable approach.
By Gabriel Gomez author of The Outer Bands
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Read More Book Reviews Here: The Kenyon Review & New West Poetry Book Review
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"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.
-Louis McKee, 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
“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
“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 Gingko Light
