Terry Blackhawk is the author of five previous poetry collections, including Escape Artist, winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Prize. She has received the Foley Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, the Michigan Governor’s Award for Arts Education, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. She is founding director of Detroit’s acclaimed InsideOut Literary Arts Project and lives and writes not far from the river in Detroit, Michigan.

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“Early in The Light Between the poet writes in the voice of an abandoned Medea berating the errant Jason—‘I have no language / to replace what I have lost.’ The courage and success of this book is its rediscovery of that necessary language. As the poet travels the country or moves through the streets of Detroit, she finds solace in the trees, birds, and people around her, until the ‘half a song’ heard alone on a New Year’s Eve is absorbed by a celebratory and ‘brightening silence.’ It is the measure of Terry Blackhawk’s skill that she carries us with her and convinces us of the importance of the journey.”
—Keith Taylor

“In this collection of new poems, The Light Between, her best book yet, Terry Blackhawk has found new words and a new world to wed herself to, a world made up of birdsong and ‘new timbres of green, multiplicities / of green: green fronds in a green / wind, whole childhoods / of green.’ Blackhawk sees the light between love and divorce, between newness and neutrality, and she has shaped it, she has given this light and this new language the fullness of her attention, the heft that has become this book. Blackhawk has found the song in the severing, the music in the mirage of marriage and its loss. ‘What better use of sorrow than make a blossom of it?’ This book is Blackhawk’s breaking into blossom, it is her waltzing off with scars raised, her praise-song to greener pastures.”
—Peter Markus

“Terry Blackhawk’s new collection is an elegant meditation on loss and, in the aftermath of what is lost—relationships; certain sounds; an other, younger self—that which is gained. The intricate progression of these poems reveals the poet at work remembering and forgetting, then forging the thrilling slippages and figurative language that can make the mind leap to a new apprehension of things. Haunted by what can’t be replaced—like ‘lost sounds / trying to make themselves heard’—The Light Betweenis a graceful articulation of the persistence of language to give back to us a knowing reflection of ourselves.”
—Natasha Trethewey