Orlando White

Bone Light

Orlando White's Bone Light recreates poetry from the molecular
level. His vision presents language letter by letter: as body,
as recipe, as originary myth, as admonition. Here, poetry moves
stealthily through the smallest increments, in the "pause
between ink and letter when words are silent, unclothed."
In that bare space, poems keep time through their own arcane
measure and the reader sees a "human clock" emerge, one whose
face is as much halo as empty zero. This astonishing writing
dissects language with surgical and magical precision.
White peels back our assumptions like a skin and gives us
the irradiated, irreducible light of the bone.

-Elizabeth Robinson

Throughout Bone Light, Orlando White approaches the English language as if he has just encountered it, as if it were a mysterious set of symbols. Focusing on the particles of the language—the punctuation marks, the letters, the spaces between words—he turns them a while in his hand like strange inexplicable artifacts from a lost world, then sets to work, refashioning them into something he can use.

Orlando White is originally from Tólikan, Arizona. He is Diné (Navajo) of the Naaneesht’ézhi Tábaahí (Zuni Water’s Edge Clan) and born for the Naakai Diné’e (Mexican Clan). He holds a BFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Brown University. His poems have appeared in Bombay Gin, In Posse Review, Oregon Literary Review, Ploughshares, They Are Flying Planes, 26 Magazine, and elsewhere. He has taught and been a visiting writer at Brown University, Colgate University, and Naropa University’s summer writing program. Currently he is teaching poetry and composition at The Art Center Design College and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bone Light is his first book.