The compacted lyrics of Radius of Light use the tension between uneasy City and restorative Nature to spark your deeper imagination. Joshua Auerbach’s first full length collection leaves you wide-eyed, even dazzled, enjoying poems whose subjects range from odd tattoos, pacing panthers, and oceanic whirlpools, to muted but probing reflections on (often sinister) foreign scenes. Full of primal imagery, his poems soothe, yet also agitate with their portrayal of our epoch’s stark desecrations. Human degradation of both urban and natural worlds leaves the inhabitants of Radius of Light as “blurs on the horizon.” The lengthy poem, “Love in the Time of Dioxin”, notes our contemporary inner distortion, where the balance between our selves and the environment is nearly incorrigible. Here is a vision that is at the same time uplifting and troubling. Figures close or shift apart, toward joyful light or the opposite. Life in the twenty-first century is illumined. At the heart of this accomplished collection shines mystery, alchemy, and vision.