When Korean novelist Han Kang won the Nobel prize in literature in 2024, the committee praised her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. In other words, Han’s work looks both out at the world – towards the 1980 Gwangju massacre fictionalised in her novel Human Acts –  and inward to the human experience, as with The Vegetarian’s portrait of one woman’s claustrophobic struggle.

Much of the appeal of Han’s work is in its mystery, the gaps she leaves for the reader to close. So it is tantalising to have this collection of prose, “a book of reflections” that might illuminate the darker corners of her work.

It is a hope partly fulfilled. Light and Thread – the title from a poem Han wrote at the age of eight – comes in three parts, which we might categorise as writing, poetry and gardening. The title essay, her Nobel laureate lecture, does open up the novels a little. The Vegetarian, about a woman whose progressive rejection of social norms results in her trying to become a plant, was, we learn, inspired by questions such as, “To what depths can we reject violence?” A book for Han is complete “when I reach the end of these questions – which is not the same as when I find answers to them”.

It’s no surprise that Han, haunted by a youthful encounter with a photo book commemorating the victims of the Gwangju massacre, was forced to abandon a “radiant, life-affirming novel” she had been working on and write Human Acts instead. As for Greek Lessons – the story of a mute woman and a man losing his sight, and the most opaque of her novels – the question Han wrestles with tempers dread with hope. “Could it be that by regarding the softest aspects of humanity, by caressing the irrefutable warmth that resides there, we can go on living after all in this brief, violent world?” Sometimes she finds herself weeping as she writes.

It is clear that for Han, writing is a psychic necessity, an impression confirmed when she talks about her most recent novel – arguably her best yet – We Do Not Part. Its feverish state and isolated snowy landscape came from a dream Han experienced: a vision she sought to recreate for the reader. This led to a series of method‑style writing episodes: she would “lie under my desk, curled on my side, to try to experience the interior of a hole in the ground”, or “clench and unclench fistfuls of snow until my hands grow stiff, trying to make sure I’ll remember how it feels”. A dedicated approach, to be sure, even if the sceptical reader might wonder why Han couldn’t simply use her imagination.

If the writing essays are the richest part of the book, the poems that follow are slight and evasive. Meditation on Pain clearly draws on Han’s own experience of chronic pain, but its analogy of a bird in a cage offers far less visceral understanding of her condition than her account in earlier interviews of having such painful joints that she could only type by attaching pens to her fists and hammering the keyboard.

The theme of the final section is Han’s garden: a space she created in a north-facing courtyard of her home, and into which she has directed light with strategically placed mirrors. It’s a task of precise administration. “To distribute the light evenly across every tree, the angle and placement of all eight mirrors must be shifted once every 15 minutes or so.”

The way Han submits her routine to the needs of the plants makes a connection with The Vegetarian, and with the central question she reiterates in the writing essays: “What does it mean to belong to the species named human?” There is beautiful imagery: “When the southerly noon sun slowly passes these mirrors, a patch of light appears on the wall, like a window.” But sometimes a garden is just a garden, and there is​​ some very thin fare here. A declaration such as, “This morning I had the water meter checked and the septic tank cleaned” will not quicken even the keenest reader’s heart, nor will, “I heard that tomorrow, it will rain.”

In her Nobel lecture, Han says that she has not yet completed her next novel. So Light and Thread is a stop gap, for Han as well as her readers. It has moments that remind us of why her work is so important, but the work itself is what we want.

Andrea Gibson, a celebrated poet and performance artist who through their verse explored gender identity, politics and their four-year battle with terminal ovarian cancer, has died aged 49.

Gibson’s death was announced on social media by their wife, Megan Falley.

Gibson and Falley are the main subjects of the documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, which won the Festival Favorite award at the Sundance film festival and is scheduled to air on Apple TV+ later this year.

“Andrea Gibson died in their home (in Boulder, Colorado) surrounded by their wife, Meg, four ex-girlfriends, their mother and father, dozens of friends, and their three beloved dogs,” Monday’s announcement reads.

Allow Instagram content?

This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click ‘Allow and continue’.

The film, which explores the couple’s enduring love as Gibson battles cancer, is directed by Ryan White and includes an original song written by Gibson, Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile. During a screening at Sundance in January that left much of the audience in tears, Gibson said they didn’t expect to live long enough to see the documentary.

Tributes poured in Monday from friends, fans and fellow poets who said Gibson’s words had changed their lives, including writers Cheryl Strayed and Elizabeth Gilbert. Many LGBTQ+ fans said Gibson’s poetry helped them learn to love themselves. People with cancer and other terminal illnesses said Gibson made them less afraid of death by reminding them that we never really leave the ones we love.

In a poem Gibson wrote shortly before they died, titled Love Letter from the Afterlife, they wrote: “Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before.”

Linda Williams Stay was “awestruck” when her son, Aiden, took her to hear Gibson perform at a bar in San Francisco a decade ago. Their poetry was electrifying, lighting up the room with laughter, tears and love. Gibson’s poetry became a shared interest for the mother and son, and eventually helped Stay better understand her son when he came out as transgender.

“My son this morning, when he called, we just sobbed together,” Stay said. “He says, ‘Mom, Andrea saved my life.’”

Gibson’s poetry later helped Stay cope with a cancer diagnosis of her own, which brought her son back home to St George, Utah, to help take care of her. They were delighted when Gibson accepted their invitation to perform at an event celebrating the LGBTQ+ community in southern Utah.

“It was truly life-changing for our community down there, and even for our allies,” Stay said. “I hope that they got a glimpse of the magnitude of their impact for queer kids in small communities that they gave so much hope to.”

Gibson was born in Maine and moved to Colorado in the late 1990s, where they had served for the past two years as the state’s poet laureate. Their books included You Better Be Lightning, Take Me With You and Lord of the Butterflies.

Colorado governor Jared Polis said on Monday that Gibson was “truly one of a kind” and had “a unique ability to connect with the vast and diverse poetry lovers of Colorado”.

The comedian Tig Notaro, an executive producer on the documentary and Gibson’s friend of 25 years, shared on Instagram how the two came up together as performers in Colorado. Hearing Gibson perform for the first time was like witnessing the “pure essence of an old-school genuine rock star”, and their words have guided Notaro through life ever since, she said.

“The final past few days of Andrea’s life were so painful to witness, but simultaneously one of the most beautiful experiences of all of our lives,” Notaro said. “Surrounded by real human connection unfolding in the most unlikely ways during one of the most devastating losses has given me a gift that I will never be able to put into meaningful words.”

Gibson’s illness inspired many poems about mortality, depression, life and what happens next. In the 2021 poem How the Worst Day of My Life Became My Best, Gibson declared: “When I realized the storm / was inevitable, I made it / my medicine.” Two years later, they wondered: “Will the afterlife be harder if I remember / the people I love, or forget them?

“Either way, please let me remember.”

Strip Light
No more loving in the dark,
that inky aquarium
where we could be anything.
Though we unplug the lamps.
Though we blindfold each other
with scented masks.
Still, our eyelids glow like neon lips.
Still, our breath particles
fall up around us like digital rain;
sighs become strobes,
fog lights then searchlights
scanning for cons
on the lam from themselves
as we squint hard against the back walls
of our brains, star-fished and wanting
to stay lost but dirty
socks flame on the floor now
like night vision snakes and each liver spot
tea stain on bedside mugs
makes itself visible, re-dressing the room
in separate details
like a nightclub at closing
or a glass booth in which
a new school receptionist
calls me ‘the mother’
then turns to you, asking
brightly
‘And you are?’

The title of Caroline Bird’s latest collection, Ambush at Still Lake, kidnaps a once-popular movie genre that advertised its basic plotline in titles like Ambush at Tomahawk Gap. Bird heightens the dramatic and symbolic potential of hers by an imperturbable-sounding location, Still Lake. Although the title poem features an angrily satirised police chase, drugs-bust and arrest (“so many / Bobs and Bills and Bruces who couldn’t / wait to say, ‘I was there. In the bushes’”) its final metaphorical tilt is nightmarish: “We carry on / dying forever, always almost home.” In Strip Light, the attainment of home and the romantic ending it should signify are under threat.

The punned-on “strip” indicates a light that cruelly exposes the speaker and their partner, destabilising an erotic unity that would ideally be a kind of “still lake” – an “inky aquarium”, a space for “loving in the dark”. The poem is very much about heightened self-scrutiny, suggesting a relationship that feels the jab of social rules existing both outside and inside its own non-binary space. Marriage and, especially, parenthood insist that lovers can’t be “in the dark” about their social worlds, nor about each other: they are obliged to rethink their potential “to be anything”.

Despite the desperate precautions (blindfolds, unplugged lamps) the couple’s eyelids, “breath particles” and sighs get variously and ingeniously lit. The breath particles scarily “fall up around us like digital rain”. The sighs undergo an intensifying series of metamorphoses as “strobes, / fog lights then searchlights / scanning for cons / on the lam from themselves”. If the sighs connote sexual pleasure, they’re also fugitives, caught in their own glare of self-analysis or self-deception. Such figurative flights and shapeshifts often occur in Bird’s poems and are effective, however bizarre, not only because they are funny and spot-on contemporary, but because the emotional depth-charge justifies them. Here, the glare that strips the bedroom of its privacies suggests a self-consciousness that’s nearly more than the narrator’s heightened light-sensitivity can bear.

Whatever precious mystery has been sacrificed to the strip-light monster, the dark underwater interior remains in view: “we squint hard against the back walls / of our brains, star-fished and wanting / to stay lost.” For a moment the “inky aquarium” seems almost recoverable. But the socks that “flame on the floor” intrude, becoming predatory snakes which possess night-vision and are themselves lit up. Lines 14 – 17 elide the possibility of being “lost but dirty”, but the comforting adjective “dirty” immediately appends itself less appealingly to the socks.

While the narrator’s imaginative flight goes on unimpeded, the ambush results in the room’s “re-dressing” by domestication. Not only the flaming socks are guilty, but “each liver spot / tea stain on bedside mugs”. The “liver spot” resemblance is particularly disturbing, a premonition of ageing skin and engrained routines.

Now the narrator looks back, and finds other kinds of re-dressing. First, there’s the moment when lights are turned up in a nightclub, signalling the end of the party, and, perhaps, a hard sacrifice to adult/parental responsibilities.

A more extreme kind of loss is remembered when, in front of, or inside, the “glass booth” at a parents’ event attended by the female couple, “a new school receptionist / calls me ‘the mother’ / then turns to you, asking / brightly / ‘and you are?’” This would be toe-curling enough without the adverb, but the fact that the question is asked “brightly” and that “brightly” has a line of its own, plugs the words into the power-source that produced all the intrusive illumination earlier, the strip-search that morphed relentlessly, and which, even if conducted by the blind, no blindfold can erase. A personal-political hybrid, Strip Light is deeply stamped by its closing anecdote as political, even though much of it stars a sci-fi light-monster that’s treacherous, many-limbed, and in a desperate way comic.

Let the Light Pour In is “an experiment in hope”. For 10 years, the My Name Is Why author had been rising at dawn each day, writing a poem and posting it on social media. Those poems have since been turned into songs and tattoos, and emblazoned as murals on city walls.

The project also yielded this collection of poems about early morning and the meeting of darkness and light. In his introduction, Sissay says that poetry is “a daily practice. My meditation. It can take minutes or hours. A friend advised me to ‘Wake with enthusiasm to the dawning of each day’. I like that ‘cause when I write I feel like I am opening the windows to let the light pour in.”

The poems, narrated with verve and charm by their author, feature conversations between night and light – “‘How do you do it?’ said night / ‘How do you wake up and shine?’ ‘I keep it simple,’ said light / ‘One day at a time’” – and between head and heart. While there is a tendency towards mawkishness in some, others are witty or profound, telling of love, resilience and the power of nature and the elements (“The moon tells the sky / The sky tells the sea / The sea tells the tide / And the tide tells me”). In this season of short days and long, dark nights, Let the Light Pour In’s bite-size verse seeks to remind us that darkness is fleeting and that, whatever may be bringing us down, light is around the corner.

Let the Light Pour In is available via Canongate, 35mins

Further listening

Loosely Based on a Made-Up Story
James Blunt, Hachette Audio, 6hr 1min
Truth and fantasy collide in this improbably entertaining “non-memoir” from the mega-selling singer-songwriter. Read by the author.

Sanditon and Other Stories
Jane Austen, Saga Egmont, 7hr 12min
Avita Jay narrates Austen’s final, unfinished novel, which follows the fortunes of Charlotte Heywood as she makes waves at the eponymous seaside resort.