'Kristen Lang is an unusual poet in that her first two full-length books have appeared in the same year. For an outsider it’s difficult to know what the relationship between them is: it could be that SkinNotes contains poems that are earlier than those of The Weight of Light or it might be that a large group of existing poems of varying ages was simply subdivided into two manuscripts, perhaps along generally thematic lines. Whatever the case there are powerful continuities between the books just as there are significant differences.' (Introduction)
'A good ecopoem, Christopher Arigo explains, is ‘a house … founded on the tension between the cutting edge of innovation and ecological thinking’ (Arigo 2007: 3). Such poems abound in Kristin Lang’s The Weight of Light – a sensually metaphysical collection that subtly yet profoundly ekes out interrelations between humans and animals, language and nature, technology and the immaterial. In line with Gander and Kinsella’s suggestion that ecological poetry ‘might be developed rhizomatically, it might be described as a nest, a collectivity’ (Gander & Kinsella 2012: 13), Lang emphasises the thrumming yet too often overlooked interrelatedness of things via her deft weaving of motifs including moons and mountains, muscle and shadow, silence and breath. This is a collection that demands multiple readings – and rewards them – opening and offering new insights, new articulations with each fresh encounter, each return.' (Introduction)
'A good ecopoem, Christopher Arigo explains, is ‘a house … founded on the tension between the cutting edge of innovation and ecological thinking’ (Arigo 2007: 3). Such poems abound in Kristin Lang’s The Weight of Light – a sensually metaphysical collection that subtly yet profoundly ekes out interrelations between humans and animals, language and nature, technology and the immaterial. In line with Gander and Kinsella’s suggestion that ecological poetry ‘might be developed rhizomatically, it might be described as a nest, a collectivity’ (Gander & Kinsella 2012: 13), Lang emphasises the thrumming yet too often overlooked interrelatedness of things via her deft weaving of motifs including moons and mountains, muscle and shadow, silence and breath. This is a collection that demands multiple readings – and rewards them – opening and offering new insights, new articulations with each fresh encounter, each return.' (Introduction)
'Kristen Lang is an unusual poet in that her first two full-length books have appeared in the same year. For an outsider it’s difficult to know what the relationship between them is: it could be that SkinNotes contains poems that are earlier than those of The Weight of Light or it might be that a large group of existing poems of varying ages was simply subdivided into two manuscripts, perhaps along generally thematic lines. Whatever the case there are powerful continuities between the books just as there are significant differences.' (Introduction)
