This is a poignant debut, a fine-wrought book of poise and lamentation—by turns, erotic, austere, and lyrical—with a keen attention to natural beauty. Its centerpiece poems, “The Impossible Time” and “Coldwater Canyon Suite,” convey the saga of what it meant to be young, gallant, and compass-less in the shocking early years of the AIDS epidemic. Because that was my experience as well, reading this made for a powerful aide-memoire of that daunting, heartbreaking era. Emerson’s intrepid survivor’s task, his elegiac portraiture and vivid witness pierce us out of necessity.

The radiant from which Luminous Body, Glittering Ash emanates is the body’s own perishable luminosity, these poems the lyric record of the body’s trajectory as a falling star—meteoric, brief—during the height of the AIDS pandemic. Like those meteors, Emerson convinces us, our transits leave a crypto-crystalline gleam, yet the heart, to be safe, leaves the body, turns invisible, but continues to throw sparks long after it stops. Emerson’s deftly trenchant poems never succumb to bathos but pinpoint the l’heure exquise of our fleeting existence and name it, a quality that destines this collection to become a classic in league with Thom Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats.

I don’t know what to say about C.W. Emerson’s poems except that they break my heart over and over again, and then again, and in that breakage, there’s something luminous, always - as if your ability to be broken, in itself, makes us ever more human, ever more broken, ever more human. These poems are brave and beautiful, crystal clear, and deeply mysterious, they embody the sensual and the sacred, without contradiction, without apology. I’m grateful to have them to read and to remind me what it is to be fully alive.