Two Minutes of Light

Winner of the 2008 Perugia Press Prize and the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, Two Minutes of Light, introduces Nancy K. Pearson, a poet with a powerful hand and ear. In this book, she writes about a descent into the madness of addiction, suicide attempts, and self-mutilation, and the foil to these destructive ways is art itself the poet's gift of finding small beauty in unlikely places and transforming it into poetry. With stunning imagination, acute mindfulness, downright spunk, and not one ounce of sentimentality or gratuitousness, Pearson mines this despair for its minutes of light that provide rungs toward a more livable life. While immersed in the world of psychiatric wards, crack motels, selling drugs, even cutting off a finger, the poet, almost unnervingly, writes about sea grass, milkweed, ghost crabs, fruit seeds, and wild lilies. Pearson's genius is her curiously ironic voice, the immediacy of her images, and her fearless attitude.