Certain Lightnings

Certain Lightnings gathers the charged, fragile moments that alter a life-those shocks of awe, grief, wonder, and recognition that arrive like weather across the mind. In poems spanning Midwest landscapes, ancient mythologies, hospital rooms, digital hauntings, and cosmic thresholds, Scott Krieger traces the hidden circuitry that links private experience to vast forces of history and the natural world. Across three sections-Thresholds, Reckonings, and Openings-these poems watch storm fronts roll over airports, reindeer collapse in electric truce, neurons retry the act of living, and the dead murmur through web server logs. The ordinary becomes volatile: a birch on Lake Superior glows with intimacy; a pawnshop sky burns orange over Walmart; a hospital heart monitor keeps vigil while loved ones hover between breaths. Lightning, both literal and interior, becomes a figure for revelation-whether divine or catastrophic, whether blessing or break. Krieger's work moves with a physicist's attention to pattern and a mystic's willingness to question it. His lens jumps from the infinitesimal to the planetary, from the ancient Pueblo sipapu to AM radio waves bouncing off night sky, from the cowbird smuggled into another nest to the dark calculus of freedom bought, sold, or lived against the grain. Language becomes the wire through which the current passes, carrying news of the body, the beloved, and the wider world-sometimes harmoniously, sometimes against our will. Tender, restless, and fiercely attentive, Certain Lightnings explores how we endure what breaks us, how we love amid collapse, and how the world-despite catastrophe-keeps singing new names for itself. These poems invite the reader to cross thresholds of intimacy and imagination, to look harder at beauty without denying sorrow, and to recognize the strange electricity running through even the quietest moments. Charged with wonder, grief, and a hard-won curiosity, this collection reminds us that illumination is rarely gentle, and often arrives just before the darkness lifts.