Too Bright to See

Poems about love, marriage, aging, sickness, mortality, parents, trauma, pandemic, racism, sexism, roses, typography, murder, technology, God, and at least one time capsule.

David Booth uses a variety of forms and genres in this collection, and he paints a picture that is both real and literary of life in his native city of San Francisco. There are shelter-in-place friends, lovers, caretakers, Puck, sixth graders, grandmothers, Harry Hay, a sacred pedestrian, and Gilda Radner. 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.