Cover design by Maisonneke
Cover art: Duane Michals, "The Spirits Leaves the Body" (1968)
Read or hear Malachi read a selection of poems from the book.
Invite Malachi to read at your series, festival, or university.
“Black’s powerful second collection (after Storm Toward Morning) immerses readers in the gritty New York City of his youth… crafting intimate narratives with expansive existential musings…. Throughout, Black transforms memory from historical fact to lived experience… these poems shine with a melancholic beauty.”
"In Malachi Black's poems, you get the sense that every syllable and phrase has been tinkered and wrestled with in the attempt to make the language completely embody experience…. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Black uses words not as symbolic referents but as sacramental presences capable of rendering the world in all its material density and spiritual nuance."
"This is a book of great, life-making lyricism. Every word of Indirect Light sings."
“Here, as in a seance, Malachi Black calls forth spirits from a hazardous youth in the opioid-infected suburbs of New York City, a youth measured in lovers and users, in the early deaths of friends, in evenings spent in back-alleys…. Indirect Light is not a book about redemption; instead, it is a book about a more complicated grace that might arise from thought, memory, memorial, and art. Black’s technical skill, his mastery of the music of poetry, is as breathtaking as the intelligence and feeling that live in these poems.“
"Reading Malachi Black’s Indirect Light feels like being on the receiving end of Tennyson’s In Memoriam shot through a many-prismed lens, as the intensity of the collection’s longing reaches toward many persons, its grieving a flowering out…. Black’s much-anticipated second book is a significant contribution to the ongoing tradition of the elegiac form."