The selected poems explore questions the author does not seek to resolve, but to inhabit. They move through uncertainty as a method, approaching themes of identity, and coming out alongside experiences of mental health struggle. Rather than offering explanation or closure, the poems trace moments of fragility, illumination, and fracture.
Light engages with memory and loss, with the afterlife of catastrophe and the quiet labour of care—towards the self, towards others, and towards a damaged world. Through a combination of text and image, the poems create a space where tenderness and disruption coexist, and where writing becomes a way of staying with what is difficult, unfinished, and unresolved.
The project is part of the subtheme Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss, Symbiotic Futures – Ecopoetics in the Age of Extinction, Disrupted Realities – Poetry and the Politics of Truth, The Poetics of Care – Intimacy, Tenderness, Repair.
Author
Joseph O Brien
Joseph O Brien is an Irish writer working across poetry, prose, and playwriting. He has published two volumes, though his primary focus is on theatre and dramatic writing. His relationship with language is distinctive and deeply embodied: living with dyslexia, Joseph approaches writing as a visual and spatial practice, where words form images and narratives before they ever reach the page.
He does not keep written notes; his poems and scenes are composed and held entirely in his mind, a process that is both demanding and fragile. Some ideas are inevitably lost, yet he admits that he would rather lose them than release a sentence that does not feel exact. This tension between memory, precision, and disappearance is central to his work.
Alongside his literary practice, Joseph works in the disability sector, an area he feels passionately connected to and which strongly informs his artistic outlook. Early in his education, a teacher once advised him not to use words he could not spell—“which,” he notes, “was most words.” He is glad he chose to ignore that advice.
