One could be forgiven for thinking the early pandemic years felt as if life was a perpetual series of boxes--from Zoom rooms to the boundaries of one's home--and it's that sense of constriction Kate Zambreno (Green Girl) plays with beautifully in The Light Room, a somber, intellectual gut punch she calls a "collection of meditations." Like the Joseph Cornell boxes Zambreno frequently cites, an enclosure focuses attention on an interior's features. In Zambreno's case, they included the struggles of caring for a kindergarten-age daughter and newborn baby in Prospect Park, fretting about climate change, and "surviving on almost no sleep, while teaching a full slate of classes."
In one emotionally resonant section after another, Zambreno chronicles her struggles. She describes meetings with other mothers at outdoor classes and sharing parenting duties with John, her partner. With wide-ranging erudition, she cites cultural touchstones to put life in perspective: Cornell's boxes; Yūko Tsushima's novel Territory of Light, "this work of the vertiginousness of early motherhood, of exhaustion and despair and small joys"; and the expressions of grief in the work of artist David Wojnarowicz. At times, the relentless cultural references feel evasive, but that doesn't diminish the book's power. In a passage on Wojnarowicz's work after the death from AIDS of his lover, Peter Hujar, Zambreno asks: "How do we go on living and making art, in the face of so much death?" This intellectually rewarding book is an attempt to find an answer. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer