Too Bright to See

"David Booth's debut poetry collection is a bold dance that deftly moves the reader through a series of unexpected and emotional narratives, some of which I can't shake and don't expect to anytime soon."

-Adrian Todd Zuniga, author of Collision Theory and creator of Literary Death Match




"This debut collection combines a fiction writer's command of story with a poet's passion for language and line. Rather than constraining humanity's tumbling mind, this book collaborates with it, by turns leading and being led. A narrator enters a story, moving parts around like furniture. A third-person prose piece takes an abrupt left turn into an elliptical first-person poem. Bits of language appear in the margins, refusing to be absorbed or ejected. With virtuosic dexterity, Booth paints us in all our luminosity and shadow, inviting us to finally, fully inhabit our extravagant imaginations like a child who crosses into the rising sun straddling a hippopotamus. Booth's work carries us toward a horizon too bright to see."

-Sarah Rosenthal, author of Lizard




"David Booth's debut collection, Too Bright To See, offers surprise after surprise on each and every page. Tossing out limited and limiting genre definitions, Booth gives his imagination a freer, wider range using a variety of forms, genres, and states of being. Along the way he sets out the welcome mat for a deep and moving cast of characters: shelter-in-place friends, lovers, caretakers, Puck, sixth graders, grandmothers, Harry Hay, a sacred pedestrian, Gilda Radner, and many more. In a poem imagining Bach as a little boy, he describes a piece of music as "sometimes solemn, sometimes joyous, often times ardent and always tumbling humanity," an apt description for the lyrical writing throughout the book. Of the figures he conjures, Booth writes, "It's good to see them. It's good to see everybody." Here is a writer standing at an opened door, ready to let us in. We're ready to step inside.




-Toni Mirosevich, Lambda Literary Award winner and author of The Takeaway Bin