Inside Ball Lightning

(SEMO Press, 2020)

“In Rainie Oet’s Inside Ball Lightning, the displacements of migration and loss are caught within in the rippling lens of childhood. Here, memory’s prose is shot through with the lyricism of a dream-state, pulsing with strange luminosities—glow watches, ghost cams, Geocities sites, a flash of lightning caught in a microwave. This is an ambitious debut, wrought with care and an eye for the surreal in the everyday.”

—Franny Choi

"Rainie Oet has got ahold of something powerful and strange that might be ball lightning and might be a brush with infinity."

—Bruce Smith

“In the depiction of the dynamics of a Russian immigrant family, focused on the sibling relationship between the speaker and their brother Mark, the nature of what constitutes love is examined in microscopic detail . . . Inside Ball Lightning is at times a picaresque and at other times a tender tale of growing up, as seen through the discerning lens of Oet’s poetic vision.”

—Christopher Kennedy

Fermata

You’re the spiral’s eye, sky-blue balloon let-go-of,
            blood in the water, turning
fermata, chairs stacked to the ceiling. You’re fog on
            the hand mirror, window
through the highway window. You’re the gills of a carp
            looking up at the rippling
moon, mouth open. You’re the spinning cloud in me,

            creak in each swing
on the playgrounds, space between raindrops, a ghost
            putting on clothes.
You’re the moth inside the lightbulb, fluttering,
            your shadow
morphing massive on the papered walls of this room
            a storm surrounds.

You’re a dream city
            I bike through in the dark,
my headlamp powered by pedaling. I have to keep
            moving away
to make anything, even the fences, seen.

(first published in Colorado Review)