A Prestigious New Review of Cheryl Pallant’s Light at the End of the Word

BlazeVOX [books] is delighted to share the news of a significant new review of Cheryl Pallant’s Light at the End of the Word (2023), recently published in the respected online journal Restless Messengers: Poetry in Review. The review, written by poet and critic Jon Curley, offers a thoughtful and expansive reading of Pallant’s visionary poetic project and situates the book within the larger contemporary poetry landscape.

At the center of Curley’s review is the dynamic, connective energy that drives Light at the End of the Word. He characterizes Pallant’s poetry as a kind of communal field of imagination, one that seeks closeness between poet and reader while also imagining new ways that individuals and communities might exist together. In this sense, the poems operate as sites of convergence where bodies, ideas, and landscapes intersect. Curley emphasizes that Pallant’s work “pulsates,” producing a lively cascade of language that remains grounded in the physical world.

The body, in fact, is a central element in Pallant’s poetics. Curley notes that the poems continually return to the embodied self, moving, breathing, sensing, and interacting with the world. He draws connections between Pallant’s poetic practice and her life beyond the page, including her work as a dance teacher and practitioner of Reiki and Healing Touch. These experiences, he suggests, inform the kinetic and attentive qualities of her poetry, where motion and awareness become metaphors for imaginative transformation.

Throughout the review, Curley traces how Pallant’s poems weave together the physical and the metaphysical. People, places, and ideas repeatedly braid and intersect, forming networks of connection. This layered movement allows the poems to imagine alternative possibilities for living together, visions that are hopeful without being naïve. In Curley’s reading, Pallant emerges as a kind of visionary poet, one who insists that imagination itself is a tool for reshaping reality.

Hope is therefore not an abstraction in Light at the End of the Word but an active practice. Curley describes the poems as meditative yet urgent, often building rhythmic repetitions that function like incantations or mantras. Through these patterns of language, Pallant calls for renewed attention to connection, what one poem describes as the “connective tissue” that might revitalize both individual and collective life.

Curley also celebrates Pallant’s exuberant linguistic play. Puns, word shifts, and surprising turns of phrase appear throughout the book, creating what he describes as zones of “enchanting wit and antic verbal mischief.” Yet this wordplay is not merely decorative. Instead, it opens new conceptual terrain, allowing the poems to reimagine language itself as a tool for transformation.

For Curley, the result is a collection that functions almost like a manual for living differently. The poems urge readers to reconsider familiar realities and to imagine alternative futures grounded in compassion, ecological awareness, and collective responsibility. In an era often defined by despair and fragmentation, Light at the End of the Word insists that poetry can still generate hope and possibility.

Curley concludes that Pallant’s work offers a vital illumination for our present moment, a body of poems that encourages readers to listen, imagine, and reshape the world through language.

Even more exciting, this conversation continues. We are currently working with Cheryl Pallant on her forthcoming BlazeVOX collection, Field of Here, which will extend the visionary and connective energies that animate Light at the End of the Word. We look forward to sharing more about this new project soon.

In the meantime, Curley’s insightful review reminds us of the power of Pallant’s poetic vision: a poetry that searches for connection, cultivates imagination, and lights the way forward, word by word.

Read the whole review at RESTLESS MESSENGERS: POETRY IN REVIEW
https://www.poetryinreview.com/reviews/light_at_the_end_of_the_word.html


Cheryl Pallant, Light at the End of the Word

https://www.blazevox.org/shop-1/p/light-at-the-end-of-the-word-by-cheryl-pallant