The poems in Gina Ferrara's AMBER PORCH LIGHT Light occupy equal spheres of beauty and danger. Each holds its share of compressed energy, woven with images and lyricism, examining both the ordinary and the extraordinary, revealing what is possible when luminosity arrives in bursts. "AMBER PORCH LIGHT is a masterful balancing act. Here is a book of poems filled with unguent in the form of oranges and kiwis, papayas and gingers, lighthouses and the lumpy white meat of crabs, all counter-weighted with death by drowning and death marches, house-eating termites and threatened barrier islands, black rain and oil-soaked birds. In this collection Gina Ferrara has all the instincts of an Emily Dickinson and a Wallace Stevens. Her deft harnessing of the release rendered by the yoking of death and beauty make the poems in AMBER PORCH LIGHT read like illuminated testimony."- Darrell Bourque "Everything in these poems is aglow: not only the amber porch light, but comets, 'tarnished moonlight, ' 'milky morning light, ' meteor showers, Orion's belt, 'mint blue runway lights, ' fluorescent hospital lights, kerosene lanterns, citronella candles, white star jasmine, polished brass, and lighthouse beams. Each poem is a small and luminous feast of sensory detail. What really shines through the collection, though, is the poet's love of people and place-that place being her native New Orleans."-Julie Kane