"'Nothing attested, everything sung.' And these poems are the songs, the
mournful lieder of a reimagined life. H. L. Hix's melodies are pure;
his harmonies are haunting and strange. Incident Light composes a
soaring chorus from the dark and private notes of long-kept secrets."--
Alyson Hagy, author of Snow, Ashes
"Any new book by this inventive poet is cause for excitement."--The
Kansas City Star
"Hix's eighth collection is a fine addition to this protean poet's
fast-growing (and critically lauded) body of work. Like C.D. Wright,
Hix works both with highly wrought descriptive passages and with verse
that sounds like regular speech cutting swiftly between
them."--Publishers Weekly, starred review
H. L. Hix's Incident Light explores a life that became
"instantly mythical" after a startling revelation. The artist Petra
Soesemann learned at age forty-nine that the dad who had raised her from
birth was not her biological father. Her dad had died some years before;
her father was still alive. Her dad, like her mother, was a blue-eyed
German blond; her father was Turkish, with dark eyes and dark hair like
Petra's own.
Incident Light is a biography: not an ordered account of the facts
of a life, but an invitation into the dad's devotion, the mother's
passion, the father's honor, and especially into the daughter's own
embracing of her experience, newly understood. Incident Light
testifies to the many lives that converge on one life to lend it beauty
and mystery.
H. L. Hix teaches at the University of Wyoming. His Chromatic was
a finalist for the National Book Award.
