RaveAir MailDodging linearity, subverting convention, eluding particularity, it awes. With these micro-histories of six lighthouses—silent pillars of the coast—Barrera conjures a melancholic ode to the unreachable, quintessential beauty of solitude. You can’t look away. On Lighthouses hypnotizes in all the ways a book ought to, calling to mind the very nature of books ... Like any lighthouse, grounded and yet always at sea, On Lighthouses delights in paradox—the pull between duty and desire, ennui and mania, contentment and fear. The bibliography runs pages long, a cluttered bricolage of research. Barrera’s \'study\' of lighthouses is frenetic while her descriptions of them ring immaculately laconic. She is, in other words, definitively undefinitive ... Barrera has given every lonely soul and reader a lighthouse all her own—a fixed point, in days of solitude—a mental anchor to the earth as we drift aimlessly at sea.
