Poet and spoken-word artist Sarah Kay's A Little Daylight Left is an accessible collection that invites readers--even those new to poetry--to fall in love with the form. It launches into the first poem, "A Bird Made of Birds," even before the table of contents. The collection provides its own epigraph, one poem on behalf of them all, saying "Take this fruit./ It is what I have to offer." Kay's poems are meant to be heard, singing off the page and asserting their songs through stylistic choices. These include extended spaces between phrases that serve as microbreaks within a line and internal repetitions that pulse like those found in "Jakarta, January," which asks, "what is a boy/ if not a glowing thing learning what he can get away with" before reprising the question a few lines later: "what is a girl/ if not a pulsing thing learning what the world will take from her."
The collection, divided into three sections, is accentuated by line drawings from illustrator Sophia Janowitz, Kay's lifelong friend, who features in the poem "Pulling a Sarah": "she doesn't have to say any more for me to know she is still there." Kay swings between feelings of abiding connection, like those between her family or friends, and feeling alone, as in "Hitting Rocks into Useless Bay," which wrestles with the idea of metaphor and meaning in the wake of loss: "Let the young men be just young men, & not my heart, forever swinging./ Let the water be just water & not the vast loneliness." But always, A Little Daylight Left is a truth teller's song, enchanting and honest. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian