While writing “Infinity Mirror” and most of the poems in Shadow of the Living Brightness, I was reading a lot of negative theology—theology that conceives of a God that is knowable neither by his affirmations nor by his negations. I’m not particularly religious myself, but I was interested (philosophically and emotionally) in how this idea applies to my relationships with the world and with my concept of self, which, by extension, seems also to exist in a kind of permeable non-state—unfixed from a definable reality, yet not necessarily less vital for it. The poem—and the collection as a whole—play with the feelings of uncomfortable alienness and terrible kinship that come with being a human in the world.
Dominique Béchard reads from Shadow of the Living Brightness
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Shadow of the Living Brightness is Dominique Béchard’s second collection. Her first, One Dog Town, came out with Gaspereau in 2019. She was a co-winner of the Frog Hollow Chapbook Contest in 2022 for Infinity Mirror . She has an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of New Brunswick. She currently lives in Windsor, where she works in publishing.
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Shadow of the Living Brightness is available here on All Lit Up, or from your favourite indie bookstore.
