“‘Nothing attested, everything sung.’  And these poems are the songs, the mournful lieder of a reimagined life.  H. L. Hix’s melodies are pure; his harmonies are haunting and strange. Incident Light composes a soaring chorus from the dark and private notes of long-kept secrets.”— Alyson Hagy, author of Snow, Ashes

“Any new book by this inventive poet is cause for excitement.”—The Kansas City Star

“Hix’s eighth collection is a fine addition to this protean poet’s fast-growing (and critically lauded) body of work. Like C.D. Wright, Hix works both with highly wrought descriptive passages and with verse that sounds like regular speech cutting swiftly between them.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

H. L. Hix’s Incident Light explores a life that became “instantly mythical” after a startling revelation.  The artist Petra Soesemann learned at age forty-nine that the dad who had raised her from birth was not her biological father.  Her dad had died some years before; her father was still alive.  Her dad, like her mother, was a blue-eyed German blond; her father was Turkish, with dark eyes and dark hair like Petra’s own. 

Incident Light is a biography: not an ordered account of the facts of a life, but an invitation into the dad’s devotion, the mother’s passion, the father’s honor, and especially into the daughter’s own embracing of her experience, newly understood.  Incident Light testifies to the many lives that converge on one life to lend it beauty and mystery.

H. L. Hix has published five books of poetry, a book of literary criticism, and an anthology with Etruscan, and has two more books forthcoming.  He teaches in the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Wyoming.  His awards include the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Peregrine Smith Award, and fellowships from the NEA, the Kansas Arts Commission, and the Missouri Arts Council. 

Publication date: November 2009

Read an excerpt of Incident Light. 

Read Abigail Deutsch’s review of Hix’s Incident Light from Poetry Magazine.

A review of H. L. Hix’s Incident Light is featured on The Best American Poetry’s website.