The Lamp and Other Sources of Shadow is a debut collection of finely wrought lines and inventive imagination, and winner of the 2026 Cardinal Poetry Prize, selected by three-time US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. In these poems, the world operates by the logic of folk tale and nightmare, full of wry menace and impossible sorrow. A fox laces his boots until he disappears inside them. A headless shadow climbs from a well in a bucket. An ocean mourns its own small death, walking beside itself. The umbrellas in the entryway have been up to something in the night.

Dembo draws on a long Eastern European tradition in which allegory and fable carry what direct speech cannot: everyday objects accrue enormous significance, the irrationality of history finds form in surreal image and absurdist fable, and the poet speaks as witness to collective experience in a voice of plain, ironic survival. Working in the mode of Charles Simic and Wislawa Szymborska, she transposes historical pressure into strange and luminous image. Objects carry memory. Animals bear the weight of what people cannot say aloud. The domestic shelters something ancient. These poems move through a landscape where the past is a living presence.

Captivating and enigmatic, fanciful and menacing, The Lamp and Other Sources of Shadow announces a poet utterly at home in the strange.

SAMPLE POEM]

In the Morning

She wakes, goes downstairs, arranges the three umbrellas
So their handles tilt into the corner of the entryway
Behind the coatrack. All of the furniture,
From the desk to the chair, assume their places
As though pressing their feet into the floor.
What were they doing in the night
While she was sleeping? Nothing, surely
Some person grabbing a coat disturbed the umbrellas.

Some person grabbing a coat disturbed the umbrellas.