Bone Light
Orlando White's Bone Light recreates poetry from the molecular level.His vision presents language letter by letter: as body, as recipe, asoriginary myth, as admonition. Here, poetry moves stealthily throughthe smallest increments, in the "pause between ink and letter whenwords are silent, unclothed." In that bare space, poems keep timethrough their own arcane measure and the reader sees a "humanclock"emerge, one whose face is as much halo as empty zero.   Thisastonishing writing dissects language with surgical and magicalprecision. White peels back our assumptions like a skin and gives usthe irradiated, irreducible light of the bone. Elizabeth RobinsonOrlando White's poetry glimmers with Diné notions of “thought creating thought” while re-configuringsaad(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 Lightis an occasion marking the illumination of the body’s silence, the blank areas in which our breathingshadowsthe 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 the act of the recoding of language.  – Sherwin Bitsui