Praise for Something Bright

The exquisitely haunting poems in Something Bright are steeped in memory and longing and reverence for the world, imperfect as it may be. Like his grandmother sifting ashes from the stove in her trailer, Ryler Dustin finds something precious even in “the rampant damages of love” and celebrates how “the forbidden holds inside of it the holy.”
—Grace Bauer, author of Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems

What I have loved about Ryler Dustin’s poems since I first heard him read them in Bellingham, Washington, back in 2007 is the way they are offered with a gentle quiet that gives way to the quiet in me. Something Bright is no different, how his reflections on memory and place within the Pacific Northwest call to how the we fit in the worlds that surround us, similar to how a walk in the forest allows us to join the conversation of silence that passes between the trees.
—Anis Mojgani, Poet Laureate of Oregon

Although the poems in Something Bright range widely (from a hardscrabble trailer park in the Pacific Northwest to London to the very edge of our galaxy), they are united by Ryler Dustin’s fine intelligence and his mastery of image and tone. With real clarity, these poems meditate on the persistence of memory, the difficulties of love, and the curiosities of ecology, always offering us voyages toward knowledge, awe, and an invigorated sense of self.
—Kevin Prufer, author of The Art of Fiction: Poems

• Two poems from Something Bright in Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 13