What Is Not Missing Is Light

Poetry. In Bridgette Bates' WHAT IS NOT MISSING IS LIGHT, shards of history are sharpened against the imagined experience of various--crumbling, complex, disfigured, celebrated, striking--muses; some statues, some legend, some surfacing from memory. Part prose, part layering of the chiseled line, we are introduced to a gaze that includes all aspects of a relic's presence, and all aspects of the act of being present: "I will repair our damage," writes Bates, "by describing a heap of stones,/ the start of a wall." Bates' commitment to what (art, recollection, theft, and lie) survives is captured in a series of surprising and spirited vignettes. "Bridgette Bates is a muse's dream- votary, the best possible and readiest visitor to the whole idea of the museum. Why? Because her visits there produce not the tedious descriptiveness of the camera, but spells of observation, recollection, invention, and wish. These poems unfold organically, gracefully--as though the thinking a sculpture might engender were itself a natural artform. But let it not be thought that Bates isn't attentive to the physical particulars of her museums--she most certainly is--it's just that she sees them not through a camera's but a human lens, drawing distinctions and forging associations that no machine can. WHAT IS NOT MISSING IS LIGHT restores our faith in the human by reminding us of our capacity to do just that."--Timothy Donnelly "In Bridgette Bates' vitally intelligent debut, prose poems center around figures of women rendered in statuary, while the poems' speaker lives as flesh made word, an entwining of a curious mind and its body. These gorgeous histories of objects, nations, myths, and one watchful woman make clear that the museum and its inhabitants are not immune to the dangers of war, love, and other disasters. Re