Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of Empty Room With Light, Matthew Roth

English Faculty Scholarship

The poems in Ann Hostetler's first collection, Empty Room with Light, reveal the world through the prism of everyday, domestic affairs. Hostetler, a trained visual artist and a professor of Creative Writing at Goshen College, arranges her deceptively simple poems with painterly care; as with a fine still life, the best poems here seem to be lit from within, their forms emerging not from the cunning of the artist, but from an act of attention that allows the people and objects to speak for themselves.