Dividing Untangled Light is a poetry collection that moves through love, parenthood, longing, grief, spiritual hunger, and the hard-won hope of faith, all under its central image of light being split into colors the finite heart can actually bear to see. The book is arranged as a journey, beginning in gratitude and brightness, passing through shadow and fracture, and arriving at a quieter, more prayerful kind of clarity. I came away feeling that Eufe Tantia Jr. isn’t trying to offer a tidy philosophy of suffering so much as a lived map of it, one where tenderness and ache keep brushing against each other. Poems like “Stranger,” with its astonished paternal love, “A Final Fantasy,” with its aching awareness of time’s limits, and the rainbow sequence that turns beauty into grief and then into perspective, give the collection its emotional spine.

This is not coy poetry, and it doesn’t hide behind coolness. It reaches. Sometimes it reaches with almost devotional intensity, and when that works, it works beautifully. “Stranger” genuinely moved me with its image of a child entering the world as both unknown and wholly beloved, and “A Finch’s Fears” captures the panic and sweetness of loving someone you can’t protect forever with a lovely, trembling exactness. I also found “The Road Trip’s Last Stretch” especially strong because it loosens the form just enough to feel conversational and alive, letting regret, domestic intimacy, memory, and longing gather naturally as the car keeps moving toward sunset.

The writing itself is often lush, image-heavy, and unabashedly literary. Tantia likes allegory, elevated diction, mythic reference, and moral seriousness, and I think the collection is strongest when those instincts are grounded by ordinary feeling. “A Final Fantasy” is a great example of that balance, because its game vocabulary could have felt gimmicky, but instead it becomes a surprisingly effective language for adult exhaustion, responsibility, and the terrible fact that no one gets a second run. I was also struck by the book’s willingness to press on large questions of artistic vocation, spiritual hollowness, ritual, memory, and self-deception in poems like “Finding Calliope,” “Rituals,” and “Descent.” At times, I did feel the collection leans into grandeur, so that a few poems become more stately than piercing, more adorned than immediate. But even then, the ambition is real.

I found Dividing Untangled Light affecting, thoughtful, and deeply earnest in a way that feels increasingly rare. It’s a book preoccupied with what lasts when beauty fades, when memory falters, when love is tested by time, and when faith has to survive the dark without becoming simplistic. I’d recommend this collection to readers who like reflective, spiritually inflected poetry, especially those drawn to poems about family, longing, mortality, and the search for meaning. This is a book for people who don’t mind stopping to look at the light as it breaks.

Pages: 211 | ASIN : B0G6XJLN34