After discovering April Gornik at the Dayton Art Institute's site and beginning to explore her paintings last week, I was looking forward to spending time with more of her work.

Today I'm looking at Light Before Heat. The thumbnails for Gornik's large paintings from 1980-1987 show lots of darker images - which I love - but that meant my eye was drawn to the exceptions, like the lovely, light-filled (light-made?) Light Before Heat.

On a quick skim, I saw "Off-████████ " which sure makes me think "off-Broadway."

On a further skim, I note the very first sentence ends with "is an ████████ ███████. ", and that "is" suggests a living person. And that "an" needs to be followed by a vowel, which is making me think "American author."

I love this book. I'm wending my way through it, taking my time, taking time to appreciate Kimmerer's stories and images, her experiences and understanding.

One of the images that stays with me the most is her standing waist-deep in a river, for hours on end, recording the layers of mosses growing on the cliffs edging the river. I love reading about the specifics of her field work.

Right away this looks like something related math, what with the [█, █) and ~ ███(█).

I'm trying to spend a little less time on these, so let me try a few things right away:

So, the main thing we have to go on at first is punctuation. I notice the _._ in the bullet list about a quarter of the way through. There are similar _._______ blanks a few paragraphs later. That makes me think of numbers, so possibly a ratio or measurement.

"during," one of the free words, appears 28 times; that seems like a lot.

Then 1/3 of the way down, there's a bullet list with ~_ and _______ per ___, which again look like math and numbers.

So, my first wild guess is gravity, which is wrong but at least appears twice.

I discovered April Gornik at the Dayton Art Institute's site, and a quick web search turned up her own site.

What beautiful paintings.

I spent several minutes looking at Blue Day, Blue Night. The trees are nearly black, and the sky is a deep storm-suggestive blue, with ice floe clouds.

I was delighted to find this in one of my neighborhood free library boxes.

I could have sworn I first heard about it via the NPR Book Concierge (now known as Best Books), but I don't see it anywhere on the site, so I must be mistaken.

As someone who delights in lots of things and tries to make it a practice to notice the delightful, I am the perfect audience for this book.

I utterly love the repetition in this poem, the feel of the repetition, the weight of it and resonance of it.

I first learned about The Scale Omnibus in spring of 2021 when the author, Francesco Balena, was giving away for free.

There's a new version out, and it still has hundreds of scales in dizzying quantity of variations, but now Balena has added more information about similar scales.

It's a bargain at 9 euros. If you'd like to get a sense of how it works, you can download a free excerpt.

Wow, this is just so lovely.

(I never know what to write about poems I like. I really just want to write "Go read it!" in big urging letters.)

Funny; I had thought it rhymed.

I love the things Stallings hears, and notices, the reinterpretations she finds.

This poem, which could be sad or hopeful, makes me happy.