When the Light Is Mine is a raw, messy, and relatable collection of poems about growing up poor, tangled in fundamentalist religion, and tangled inside your own head. Chaz Holesworth moves through shame, faith, politics, love, self-loathing, and music, talking to God, to America, to exes, and to himself, often all at once. The book feels like a long late-night monologue where the speaker keeps circling the same wounds, trying to get them to finally bleed clean.

The poems lean into repetition, riffs, and a kind of rambling rhythm that feels very close to song lyrics. The intro even calls out that influence, and I could feel it in pieces that read like verses in a track that never quite resolves. The language is blunt and sometimes crude. Religion and American culture get hit hard, with jabs at whitewashed Jesus, televangelist greed, the KKK, and lazy patriotism. At the same time, the voice turns on itself just as sharply, poking at OCD habits, body image, sexual shame, and the urge to disappear. I liked that refusal to let anyone off the hook, including the speaker. It gave the collection an honest, slightly scorched tone that stuck with me.

I also found moments of softness peeking through all the yelling, and those were the ones that hit me the most. When the poems shift toward love and connection, the voice loosens, gets playful, even hopeful. The pieces about music and favorite songs feel like little altars, the one place where belief is allowed without sarcasm. I felt a real ache in the tension between wanting to burn everything down, and wanting to be held, to be seen as beautiful, to believe that there is a version of life that is not just trauma on repeat. Sometimes the book leans into rant and self-mockery that I felt the emotional impact blur under volume. But there are many lines and images that land hard, and when they do, they feel earned.

This is not a neat or balanced collection, and I don’t think it wants to be. It’s chaotic, angry, funny in a bitter way, and often uncomfortable, especially around faith and sex. If you live with religious trauma, class struggle, or obsessive self-talk, and you like work that spills its guts without cleaning the floor first, this book will likely feel familiar in a deep, strange way. I would recommend When the Light Is Mine to readers who love lyric, stream-of-consciousness poetry, who do not mind strong opinions about religion and politics, and who are looking for company in the darker corners of their own thoughts.

Pages: 128 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0FPZHK1VR