ALT "A. Light Zachary is so adept with voice in More Sure that it's the best kind of dizzying, like an amusement park: funhouse mirror to deathdrop rollercoaster. The strategies and structures also change often, then circle back. The narrators too. It reads like if Al and a guru and a radical faerie and a lawyer and a friendly talking dog were blended into one. It's hard to describe a book this inventive, from its wide-ranging use of the page, to strikethrough, to a list poem, to meditations and definitions and questionnaires. Every new poem was a thrill, but still somehow, despite all that breadth of approach, there is a confident integrity, so that More Sure feels both familiar and sui generis."
ALT Light is holding up a copy of their book MORE SURE. The background: a view from their front porch, near sunset, overlooking a small bay on the coast of New Brunswick.
ALT Three reviews of Light's book MORE SURE. A review by BuzzFeed begins: "Zachary's debut is a vivid, playful celebration of queer fluidity and gleeful uncertainty..." A review by Xtra Magazine begins: "Even among the major queer poets of our age like Ocean Vuong and Saeed Jones, Zachary holds their own..." And a review by Book Riot begins: "Easily one of my favourite poetry collections of the year..."
![Zachary’s debut collection is a vivid and playful celebration of trans complexity, queer fluidity, and gleeful uncertainty. In poems that are by turns lyrical, incendiary, and formally inventive, they explore gender, wildness, becoming and unbecoming, family, the power of language, the sacredness of trans bodies, and, most poignantly, change. In a series of poems titled “Meditations,” Zachary inserts new words and phrases into quotes from Marcus Aurelius, queering his philosophy into a new kind of wisdom. In one of the longest (and most beautiful) poems, the speaker considers what it means to hide pieces of themself during a family visit. “What does it mean to be a man on clay / and a woman on concrete? To trip between the two?” Zachary asks, and so this collection trips and skips and dances, refusing to adhere to rigid binaries of gender and sexuality, instead honoring the weird magic of transformation in all its forms [...and so on]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FtNws32WYAAy4xH.png?name=orig)
ALT Zachary’s debut collection is a vivid and playful celebration of trans complexity, queer fluidity, and gleeful uncertainty. In poems that are by turns lyrical, incendiary, and formally inventive, they explore gender, wildness, becoming and unbecoming, family, the power of language, the sacredness of trans bodies, and, most poignantly, change. In a series of poems titled “Meditations,” Zachary inserts new words and phrases into quotes from Marcus Aurelius, queering his philosophy into a new kind of wisdom. In one of the longest (and most beautiful) poems, the speaker considers what it means to hide pieces of themself during a family visit. “What does it mean to be a man on clay / and a woman on concrete? To trip between the two?” Zachary asks, and so this collection trips and skips and dances, refusing to adhere to rigid binaries of gender and sexuality, instead honoring the weird magic of transformation in all its forms [...and so on]