Diane Wakoski's Lady of Light offers all new poems - continuing her lifetime tropes sprawling forms and general "bad assery." In "Now She Has Disappeared in Water" she mourns the death of her sister Marilyn in long series of lament recall and sometimes hard self-examination. In a bonus book within a book "Rhodochrosite Light " she writes everyday as she watches Daniel Barenboim play Beethoven on DVDs during Fall 2016. From liking "a man in a suit and tie" to stating "music reveals everything " she is both audience and creator an interweaving of pure esthetic response daily life and memory of her earlier years at the piano. Lady of Light is a tour de force.

Diane Wakoski who was born in Southern California and educated at UC Berkeley lived and began her poetry career in New York City from 1960-1973. She has earned her living as a book store clerk a junior high school teacher in Manhattan a library story-teller a Visiting Writer and for ten years on-the-road by giving poetry readings on college campuses. She served as Poet in Residence at Michigan State University from 1975 until she retired as a University Distinguished Professor.

Her work has been published in more than twenty collections and many slim volumes of poetry since her first book Coins &amp Coffins was published by Hawk's Well Press in 1962. Her selected poems Emerald Ice won the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America in 1989.