Root of Light

At the raw base of our limbs, just as green sprouts and thin tentacles tap into new soil, Michelle Doege's poems get deep into our "marrow." The poems in Root of Light time travel among the living and the dead, between the ancestral and family homes of Germany, the US, her wife's native India, and their new home of Canada. These vivid and visceral poems embody how forced migrations and border crossings, whether driven by famine or persecution or love, can leave the migrant feeling severed from the family tree. And yet, these illusive and permeable borders are never as solid as they seem. Doege's poems sprout trees from the clearcut in unexpected crevices infused with the green and radiant light of Hildegard von Bingen or the sturdiness of the poet's father, her "one solid oak," who taught her to build beauty from the heart of the wood.