Rebecca Norris Webb, A Difficulty is a light, 2024

This is poet and photographer Rebecca Norris Webb’s first hybrid poetry collection, punctuated by more than a dozen of her lyrical photographs. This elegiac book explores the geography of loss—both personal and environmental— after the suicide of her sole remaining brother, compounded by the earlier loss of his identical twin. Glimpse by glimpse, she also follows the ever-shifting world of light beginning in Trieste, Italy, then traveling from Cape Cod to the Dakotas, from New England to the Carolinas, ultimately observing bird migrations in the American South and northern France, as this book is also a meditation on various kinds of twinning—birds and brothers, grieving and migration, loss and light, badlands and coastlines, words and images, and seeing and dreaming.