Book excerpt: Gathering Broken Light confronts pasts we cannot understand, largely following the October 2017 mass shooting. Anchored in the severity and the beauty of the Mojave Desert landscape, fractured narratives, surrealist repetition, and imagistic lyricism work to contemplate grief, including both overwhelming sorrow and deep love. A voice yearns, "I wish I could sing the sky to you." In a collection that refuses to flatten the horrors of gun violence, both "flashing restless anger" and immense sadness, acknowledging that grief never leaves entirely, these poems also offer small comforts, even hope, as the "century plants continue to bloom // slowly, like stars burn" beneath a "moon as emptiness traced / and brimming with promise / because both can be true." To those lost, this collection insists, "You deserve to be remembered."