Priscilla Long contains multitudes: scientific writer, art scholar, social activist, historical enthusiast, and well-published poet. If we are, as Muriel Rukeyser might compel us ‘to learn the edges of darkness, ’ then we must also experience illuminations both resplendent and routine: light beaming on glorious yellows and bawdy purples, spiritual blues and restful greens. Reading this book, I feel as if I’m being skillfully guided by someone who knows art and, perhaps more vividly, believes in how art makes our lives more resonant-sometimes more pleasantly aware, sometimes more susceptible to pain, but always more fully felt.

Tod Marshall, Washington State Poet Laureate, 2016-2018

Holy Magic leans into the palette of our days and lays out the case, poem by poem, that the light vibrations that surround us are more than a scientific fact, they enter our bodies, trigger our imaginations, inform our moods, soothe our senses. In ‘A Glass of Bitter Ale, ’ we see the yellow tinge of a bruise, a raincoat glistening with rain and consider the tonalities of pee.

Hues echo and inform each other in these poems, much in the way life experiences paint and retouch a person’s life. Long transmutes life’s magic from color to syllables for our delight in these varied and inventive poems. From the tragic, via the mundane, to the sublime, Holy Magic hums in technicolor the song of our existence.

Claudia Castro Luna, Washington State Poet Laureate, 2018-2021