A Difficulty is a Light

Poet and photographer Rebecca Norris Webb’s first collection of hybrid poetry, A Difficulty Is a Light is punctuated by more than a dozen of her photographs, lyrical and delicate in tone. The book explores the geography of loss – both personal and environmental – after the suicide of her only remaining brother, and the loss of her identical twin a few years earlier. Glimpse after glimpse, Rebecca Norris Webb follows the changing world of light, starting with Trieste in Italy, then from Cape Cod to the Dakotas, and from New England to the Carolinas, ending on bird migrations in the southern U.S. and northern France. This book is like a meditation on different kinds of twinning: birds and brothers, grief and migration, loss and light, badlands and coastlines, words and images, seeing and dreaming…