Yellow Light: Poems

I came across Garrett Hongo's poetry for the first time a few years when Greg Pape visited the creative writing class I teach, and "Yellow Light" (title poem from this book) is the one poem he brought with him for the students. "Yellow Light" is an anecdote about a woman coming after a long day, arms full of groceries, walking home in the evening yellow light, a tactic similar to Amy Lowell's study in whites. I subsequently bought the book, and found that all of Hongo's poems in this volume were very strong: filled with subtlety and nuance, creating whole narratives that also have portraits in them in the way that Imagist poets do, and providing the reader with dinstinct insights into the lives of ordinary people, like ones we meet and know everyday. Very rarely do I read poets who succeed in being complex yet comprehensible at the same time, and Garrett Honog succeeds in that.