White Portals

The core of White Portals by Jennifer Holley Lux is a pair of elegy-sequences, like binary black holes that have captured each other, spinning and emitting energy witnessed from history measured in light years. In one sequence, she elegizes her husband, the poet Thomas Lux, and in the other, her beloved mother Lorraine Pobat Holley. The poet has woven her binary pattern in a web strung with memories and musings in coastal towns, worldwide, that braid together like tissue in our bodies: Positano, Studland Beach, New Guinea, Kazahana, and Lux's Connecticut home. Each elegiac thread in this quilt, woven with the skill of a loomer, goes to create a quilt of death, mourning, and consolation. They all fit into a passionate, beautiful collection, Lux's first. -from the Introduction by Tom Lombardo