The exquisitely haunting poems in Something Bright are steeped in memory and longing and reverence for the world, imperfect as it may be. Like his grandmother sifting ashes from the stove in her trailer, Ryler Dustin finds something precious even in “the rampant damages of love” and celebrates how “the forbidden holds inside of it the holy.”

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—Grace Bauer, author of Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems

 

[Dustin's poems] are offered with a gentle quiet that gives way to the quiet in me ... similar to how a walk in the forest allows us to join the conversation of silence that passes between the trees.

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—Anis Mojgani, Poet Laureate of Oregon

 

With real clarity, these poems meditate on the persistence of memory, the difficulties of love, and the curiosities of ecology, always offering us voyages toward knowledge, awe, and an invigorated sense of self.
 

—Kevin Prufer, author of The Art of Fiction: Poems