Radiant Tether

Author: Aby Kaupang

Publisher: Verge Books (2023)

”A letter implies two contradictory states are one and the same: distance and intimacy. It is a paradoxical condition desire clarifies, but can’t resolve, a form of profound insecurity (the 'I' not sufficient to itself, nor the 'you' to itself) out of which lyric necessity is born. Aby Kaupang’s Radiant Tether charts, with unerring and heart-wrenching accuracy, the troubled realm of hearts harbored in one another and harmed almost wholly by the violence of the world. Almost wholly—for beneath the damage of war, beneath the haunted inner lives of neighbors, beneath mountain meadows on fire, beneath the wound the world works in us so deeply nearest facts grow unthinkable, some fundamental faith stitches the selvage back to whole cloth—a kind of life, a life that is (or could be, or will be) kind, a rescue. I know of no other book that does what this books does, stitching together the Old Testament and the war in Afghanistan, pondering God’s cruel mysteries but planting lamb’s ears in tender soil, somehow trusting what it teaches us to trust—that every separation is a bond, and what looks like two (two lives, two lands, two histories) are evidence of the whole and holy one.”

—Dan Beachy-Quick