Light Sleeper is a new collection of poems from Coleman Stevenson, author of Breakfast, The Accidental Rarefication of Pattern #5609, The Dark Exact Tarot Guide, and a book of essays accompanying the card game Metaphysik.
"Existing somewhere between a grimoire and a naturalist's most intimate diary, Light Sleeper is a profound and scintillating interior journey from a singular, alchemical mind. Prone to lists, fragments, scraps of memory, the poems in this collection become a kind of inventory, a still-life of a curio cabinet. They move seamlessly between the vast and the intimate, limning the correspondences between cosmic and domestic... This book is utterly electric in its connections, in its breadth and intimacy, gut-wrenching and full of secrets. It unfurls with a naturalist's precision."
Stephanie Adams-Santos, author of Swarm Queen's Crown
"Coleman Stevenson's Light Sleeper describes a philosophy of noticing, playing with time, space, and scale. Stevenson's language is creaturely, full of plant blood and planetary rotation... She takes the world apart, extracting its essence, melting and recombining, turning the stones of her ideas over and over, refining the language of her experience. Light Sleeper lingered with me like a circle of longed-for solitude.
Michelle Ruiz Keil, author of All of Us With Wings
"It's no simple feat to create a collection of poems that manages to be private and inviting, dark as it is light, intimate and grand, but Stevenson deftly delivers an experience that leaves us hungry for more."
Sarah Bartlett, author of Sometimes We Walk With Our Nails Out
Author Biography:
Coleman Stevenson is the author of Breakfast: 43 Poems (Reprobate/GobQ Books, 2015), The Accidental Rarefication of Pattern #5609 (Bedouin Books, 2012), The Dark Exact Tarot Guide, and a book of essays accompanying the card game Metaphysik. Her writing has also appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, and she is a regular contributor for tarot.com. In addition to her work as a designer of tarot and oracle decks through her company The Dark Exact, her fine art work, exhibited in galleries around the Pacific Northwest, focuses on the intersections between image and text. She has been a guest curator for various gallery spaces in the Portland, Oregon, area, and has taught poetry, design theory, and cultural studies at a number of different institutions there, most currently for the Literary Arts Delve series, which includes seminars at the Portland Art Museum.
