Shari Kocher

Foxstruck Shari Kocher

'In light of this task set before me to love, how am I to live?'

Through centuries, poets and artists have asked how to love and not be destroyed, how to enter the mystery of the dance and allow utter disintegration while tapping, and tapping at, the heart. This collection draws on ekphrastic and encaustic traditions in literature, alchemy and painting to explore the paradoxes of making and being, of devotion and seeing, of sustenance and sentience in matter infused with and bewildered by what we name as love.

As a book, it responds peripatetically to kinetic and quantum theories of light and speaks to the matter and manner of Earth as a living, breathing, multi-dimensional ground, yet wears its letters lightly. As poetry, it attempts to utter the unanswerable while invoking a six-pointed star, the alchemic decantation of which surrenders the light of lead to the fallible compromises of what inexplicably shifts when we name the light gold.