A Little Daylight Left: Poems (Advance Review)

A Little Daylight Left: Poems By Sarah Kay

Publisher:  Random House Publishing Group (The Dial Press)

Publication Day: April 1. 2025

A Little Daylight Left by Sarah Kay: 9780593733707 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

Advamce Review Copy provided by Publisher thorugh NetGalley

Sarah Kay’s A Little Daylight Left seems to promise ruminations on moments of peaceful and quaint effervescence: poems that accord with the gently rising building and the puffy clouds against the blue sky on the cover of this collection. There are moments of this kind: the thrillingly fleeting wonders of sunset, of love, of friends, family, of memory, and of unencumbered childhood encounters with nature, but A Little Daylight Left is always cognizant that the waning daylight can provide rhapsodic moments of illumination as well as moments that reveal searing and difficult truths.

In her portraits of loving partnerships and family connections, Kay presents a rapturous daylight that is so radiant, the unflinching honesty overwhelms. Indeed “Dreaming Boy” is so forthright in presenting the shyly hopeful trepidation present in a partnership exploring unsettled questions of gender, sexual orientation, preference, and roles –everything open, nothing hidden,– that I had a powerfully immediate cry.

With a similarly moving and gentle candor, “Tsubu “explores a kind of generational daylight, family vocabulary. and tradition against the backdrop of Sarah Kay’s aging mother The poem reveals the delicate contingency of life, and family, the precious nature of all shared time and accumulated language. But even this acknowledged mortality, the depleting daylight from which we can’t escape, does not negate the moments of wonder and brightness to be had.

Terrorism and violence, inescapable and pervasive in contemporary life, are perhaps the most challenging and confounding forces with which to contend in the little daylight we all have left. Kay reminds us that even the clear daylight blue skies can become terrorism can be harbingers – as they were during the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York or in Jakarta in 2019. Similarly, glorious post-party slivers of daylight can quickly become spotlights of existential and real terror, if an attacker catches sight of the unprotected and unsuspecting. Still, jokes, poetry, dating, relationships, art, and the onward march of human life continue, not out of a defiant perseverance, but because all the facets of human existence can occur in the little daylight left.

Some readers might find the way in which Sarah Kay represents these convergences to be challenging. Exaggerated font size and stylistic differences often announce the arrival of interrupted memory, of trauma, and other lasting and traumatic experiences.  Sometimes very wry asides appear in passages otherwise contending with serious subjects. And sometimes the unflinchingly and carefully articulated details of isolated longing –in a fertility clinic, for a lost love, for a life not subject to routine unwelcome intrusions– are so memorably illuminated that that starkness is unforgettable.   Still others might find the portrayal of New York City cosmopolitan life to be a little cliché in its revelry and self-aware finitude.   Taken as a whole, however, I think the depth and breadth of the emotional honesty of this collection, the ways in which Sarah Kay insists on witnessing  A Little Daylight Left pack a tremendous wallop.