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NOTHING BUT LIGHT: POEMS explores the sacred feminine through the poets’ shared visits to places and people of spiritual revelation—a mosque, a temple, a shaman, a tree. Its poems form a guidebook to expansive and numinous spaces of body and spirit. 

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“I admire this collaborative collection for its intensity, its formal rigor, and for the many worlds it reveals as it negotiates the space between language, the body, and the divine. Here is a poetry that does not stand still as it powers its way through the propulsive rhythms of time.” — Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human (National Book Award) 

Nothing But Light explores the sacred feminine through the poets’ shared visits to places and people of spiritual revelation-a mosque, a temple, a shaman, a tree. Its poems form a guidebook to expansive and numinous spaces of body and spirit. 

“I’m compelled by the vulnerability of these collaborative poems, how they powerfully articulate bodily experiences: the erotic, childbirth, a cancer diagnosis, chemo, miscarriage: “My blood has dried out / I write with air.” The poets pay unusual attention to the divine, writing poems that are a form of prayer (sometimes irreverent), as they invoke and invent a pantheon of female deities, drawing from Judeo-Christian and world mythology. Ruminating on mortality, they memorably ask, ‘What matters the temporary / Habit of skin and bones?’” — Rachel Galvin, Elevated Threat Level, (finalist for National Poetry Series and Alice James Books’ Kinereth Gensler Award)

“This book is a song: a rolling, rollicking dialogue with emerging selves as they take their place in a textured female lineage, confirming a “world-blown pregnancy.” In poems that move from the ecological to the erotic, Leahy and Schwartz re-wild the feminine, invoking the divine while grounding themselves firmly in the work of the body: ‘what if goddess is the in. The way through. // Relationship itself.’”  — Joe Pan, Operating Systems

About the authors

Barbara Schwartz
Barbara Schwartz

Barbara Schwartz is author of the chapbook Any Thriving Root (dancing girl press, 2017). A finalist for the [journal] 1913 Poetry Prize and the Barrow Street Poetry Prize and Alice James Award, her hybrid poetry manuscript “What Survives Is the Fire” was selected for performance at the 2023 Boomerang Theater’s First Flight New Play Festival at Congregation Beth Elohim. Her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Upstreet, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Carolina Quarterly, Quiddity, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Barbara is an education consultant, with an MFA from Sarah Lawrence. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY. 

Krista J.H. LeahyKrista J.H. Leahy‘s poetry has appeared in The Common, Free Lunch, RaritanReckoningTin House, and elsewhere. Her prose has appeared in ClarkesworldFarrago’s WainscotLady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her family.