Inviting us to live, in Orange, in the “crisis of desire,” where our actions and feelings startle us, where words cross boundaries to become our own while remaining strange, Christine Herzer suggests the possibility of showing compassion to fear, facing shame, and considering the costs of being perceived as deserving, for instance. What is the price of being provided for? What does a particular color mean? What do you remember? The encounter with Herzer’s willingness to upend the usual social sexual arrangements in favor of large, lyric and gorgeously posed questions gives experience a new intensity and depth: I always feel more respectful of the world when I’ve been reading this poet—I take less for granted, I realize (again) I am (only) a guest here. “Belonging is a matter of light,” writes Herzer—what I love about this work is the fierce, open and constantly reaffirmed willingness to go on in the dark, solitary, true to the interest in and difficulties of “space-making,” at once wildly imaginative and bravely honest.

The wandering narrator of Christine Herzer's Orange is a "light detective" who rejects, reclaims and rewrites her own narrative [including her mother] in the space of poetry. Orange is a book about resisting female narratives, from maternity to dependency. Herzer's revisioned narrative pursues knowledge as light, as freedom, and, most importantly, as resistance to darkness and servitude. I was entranced by this book about a crisis of desire and the relentless pursuit of art.

What this book does not contain is a feeling of satiety. Yet the speaker finds value paying for love, not only metaphorically but literally, even amidst grave anxieties, icy facts. Wife. Mother. Prostitute. Poet. What they have in common, if anything, becomes worthy of our consideration. And shame. What a tour de force this book turns out to be, this sacral force majeure.