Sally Albiso

Light Entering My Bones Sally Albiso

"I knew the story already, but I rushed through part one, as if it were a who-dun-it, waiting as Albiso in her well-chosen words and poignant

images tracks the elusive tumor and its hopeful demise. I knew the outcome already, but, facing her death, Albiso gracefully turns not to

what will happen, but to every direction the soul travels as it lives and contemplates. In heightened language, she explores angels and birds,

trees and light, Judaism and flight, letting each beloved experience count. The last poem reflects on lines from Neruda to lift us finally into

'a radiance that can't be subdued.'" Alice Derry, author of Hunger




"What is it we expect from death?" Sally Albiso asks in her poem "After the Neighbor's Dog Dies." In her final book, Light Entering My Bones, she

chronicles the process of dying, the pain of cancer treatment, and how to inhabit a body she knows will not survive... What time she has left, she

measures by the rhythms of the natural world, as if this is the only way she can inhabit a body that has turned against her: 'I cough up feathers/

and dream of singing/light entering my bones.'... The poems in the book never descend to self-pity, but rather find compassion for her husband,

the one who will be left behind... At their core, these are love poems... Brave, articulate, with a sharp curiosity, these poems take us step by step

through a journey we know will be our own. At times painful to read, you will emerge from the spell of this book with a renewed appreciation and

compassion for your own brief life." Karen Whalley, author of My Own Name Seems Strange to Me