In Darkness, In Light

By: Rubenstein, Errol

"We are all part dirt, part godhead."

In In Darkness, In Light, poet Errol Rubenstein explores the contradictions at the heart of being human: darkness and illumination, loneliness and love, mortality and transcendence, ruin and renewal.

Moving between the intimate and the infinite, these poems inhabit the borderlands between inner and outer worlds, sanity and madness, memory and the present moment. Rubenstein finds meaning in both the ordinary and the elemental-in family, marriage, childhood, grief, aging, nature, and the persistent awareness of mortality. Trees, rain, moonlight, gardens, animals, and changing seasons become part of a landscape in which the speaker searches for connection and a way through darkness.

At times tender and meditative, at others unsettling and surreal, In Darkness, In Light confronts the loneliness of human existence while continually returning to what anchors us: the natural world, the body, family, art, and love.

This is a collection about living between opposing forces-between the "terror of night" and the "blind friction of daytime"-and about the human impulse to reach beyond our finite lives toward something enduring.

Errol Rubenstein is also the author of Prickly Pair (2022), with photographs by David Wong, and A Shot in the Dark(2024). His poetry has appeared in Common Ground Review, Marrow Magazine, Red River Review, and elsewhere.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1950399281
• ISBN13: 9781950399284
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Potter's Wheel Publishing House
• Length: 68 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 5.5" x 8.5"