What I Know About Light - Bruce Majors

Finalist, 2020 Blue Light Poetry Prize

In language fearsomely open and fiercely raw, Bruce Majors’ newest collection, What I Know About Light, is full of poems that deal with the difficult stuff of real life. From waking where “mortality meets me / face to face each day” (“A Certain Chill”) to being “a dream of some sleeper’s indulgence” (“Hall of Mirrors”), Majors’ engagement with his subject is honest and heartfelt, sharing with the reader his pain as “I thought of my own un-holiness . . . . / I thought of a thousand ways to die” (“Heat Lightning”). This collection explores one person’s relationship with nature, with God, and with self and examines the question of a life well lived when loss and loneliness have crept past the joy like the “Winter Sun”: “a hollow thought / after the light has done its work.”

Bruce Majors has published poems in Pirene’s Fountain, Ontologica, Wordgathering, Arts and Letters, Pinesong, The Distillery, River Poets Journal, Number One, and other fine literary journals. His collection, The Fields of Owl Roost, was named finalist in the 2005 Indie Excellence Book Awards. Two chapbooks, Last Flight of Angels and Small Patches of Light, were published in 2013 and 2015 by Finishing Line Press.  He co-published an anthology, Southern Light, Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets.  Mr. Majors is a member of the Chattanooga Writers Guild.