Lumina Station

In Lumina Station, her first book since the acclaimed Astoria, Malena Mörling reflects on impermanence, perception, and the inexplicable beauty of being. Enthralled by the idea of the single continuous moment, Mörling's inimitable images--storefront mannequins, an aviary of light, forests walking straight out to the cliffs--render the fleeting moments of our lives with cinematic precision.

"The world is magic," Mörling asserts early in the book, and the pages of Lumina Station work to prove this claim over its course, engaging the mystery of the everyday with quiet wonder as meetings unfold in dreams and laundromats, on trains, and at the edge of a quarry where the speaker confronts language and time--"the invisible translator of what occurs."

Like spiral staircases, the poems stretch between the physical and metaphysical, spinning narratives that chart the connections between what we see and feel. Throughout, Mörling considers what it is to make meaning of a life--to live inside the question, rather than its answer: "Why don't I leap / from the edge / of what I know?"