Janisse Ray

Red Lanterns Janisse Ray

Red Lanterns is a collection of new poetry that navigates a borderland between the seen world and the spirit world.



Occupying a tangible world is expected of us humans. We have been taught to trust (and trust only) our five major senses, which inform the tangible. Humans, however, possess senses beyond our primary ones, not simply the sixth sense of intuition but also a sense of time, sense of responsibility, sense of being watched, and so on. Some things lie beyond the realm of human knowledge, some things are not as they appear, some places that appear empty may not be, and some things remain wild, secret, and intangible.



These poems look at the place where the wild and mysterious joins with the explicable. The poems are about connections, especially spiritual connections - human to human, human to animal, human to land, animal to animal. Many of the poems can be classified as love poems, because love is one of our most primal connections.



There is also a thread of fierceness that runs through this work. This ferocity is in seeing disconnection and fighting to restore connectivity. More than anything the book is a manifesto to protect all the connections that allow us to be creatures of spirit as much as creatures of what Flannery O'Connor called "weight and extension," meaning of the body.