The theme of the current issue of Lines + Stars seems to be a natural for inducing the development of liminal works. As the editor, Rachel Adams, puts it:

During the time of the year in which light is the most dynamic, Lines + Stars is focusing its current issue on that very concept — the ways in which we illuminate or are illuminated, and the things that keep us in the dark.

The poetry and prose collected for the issue, for the most part, does not disappoint in this regard. The pretty descriptions in Daniel Barbiero’s Driving Into a Rainstorm on the Road to Charlottesville are used to contemplate the identity of light and color and how one transitions to the other through human thought and language (and through water), though in lines that are all shorter than the title. Regina Coll’s Migration Station covers transitional themes beginning with its title, but I’m still trying to figure out what “[o]ur dogs chase the beauties” means. Gale Acuff’s Logocentric follows the contortions of the writer’s mind when it dwells in the liminal state of facing the blank page then describes the transition of these thoughts into a poem that must be defended and ends with the hint of eternal transition through revision (which is God’s provenance when it comes to history and the writer’s when it comes to words).

Amy Garret-Brown writes in a form that once, by its very hybridity, carried liminal connotations, yet as the prose poem has become accepted and normalized, consciousness of its both-andness (or perhaps its neither-norness) has been reduced. Nevertheless, in the leaps from image to image and the constant motion of the varied subjects of the piece, she manages to imbue Icicle with a sense of transition. The phrase “14 phases of solid water” implies both change and paradox. Spectrums always imply some degree of liminality, but hers do so in an expanded realm: “[t]he electromagnetic spectrum—legs of color, of sound, Vitamin D is absorbed by exposure to the sun, our bodies remade, gloved in light and sound”.

In the genre of prose prose, the very title Christine Stoddard’s Menopausal Snail refers to a state of transition and, as we find out, is a metaphor used to describe another liminal state: commuting. The narrator, too, hovers on the threshold between waking and sleep.

More strongly liminal, Liz Dolan’s Marie Curie Illuminates Her Research for Us posits light itself as in-between or ambivalently good and bad. It is both “the luminous light of the mind / and the silver white of the radium” that she worships alongside Pierre and his protege “together at night”. This makes of Curie something of an ambiguous figure, a Salome indeed, even if she is only called so by the poem’s antagonist, the protege’s wife who cannot see the light of his mind and is “luciferous”.

While it may at first seem strange to think of a woman who is metaphorically blind to light being described by an adjective derived from “light bringer”, there is another figure in the poem who works with light, Pierre, who is more literally blinded. Thus, an apparent error on the poet’s part becomes, under examination, a thematic echo that simultaneously gives an otherwise flat character a third dimension. Of course, the light the Curies bring is as dubious as that brought by Lucifer.

Not every piece, however, is as deliciously liminal and uncertain as this. Kimberley Becker’s Vellum follows the path of remembering and so moves from doubt to dull certainty, which is perhaps not a fault according to the terms of the poem itself but is one for those of us interested in transition more than an end or beginning state (so, too, the introductory stanza bores). In The Woods Stagger, David McLean follows a similar pattern. At first, he presents an appropriately disorderly and discordant set of thoughts to portray the transition of a forest to winter. Unfortunately, the concluding couplet undoes that beautiful chaos with a pat conclusion. His Where God Was, while relating a transition, suffers from too much certainty throughout.