
-Diane Jarvenpa, The Way She Told Her Story
Blumenson expands the familiar aphorism-where you look determines what
you see-in her title poem, "It's a matter/of how I choose to see/the world in the
quickening light." These intimate poems invite the reader in as she dances the tango;
embraces womanhood; and walks through the woods "stealing apples." Readers will
be prompted to consider similar "sights." Be ready for your own quickening.
-Ted Bowman, The Wind Blows, The Ice Breaks
The Quickening Light, June Blumenson's collection of new poems, is written with
"a love that sometimes walks on water...." There's a hardness in her work that is
strengthened, paradoxically, by a plaintive aura as well as humor...." in a world's
"unquenchable appetite for sorrow." Would that we all could express our lives as
intimately and artfully. "I want to go on/forever like a comet of light...," Blumenson
writes. The poems offer this comet to us all.
-Sharon Chmielarz, Speaking in Riddles
In Blumenson's exquisite second collection of poems, The Quickening Light, we make
our "solitary way" through a "world at large." Exiled from "the delicious garden,"
there is an urgency in these poems to reconcile our "imperfect world." "Ask me if I would
do everything again?" she writes and tells us, "...I have shed/enough tears to wash me
out/beyond the sea somewhere/and burst the seams of life again."
-Tim Nolan, Lines