Light the Lights presents close-ups from a variety of points where three continents - America, Europe, and Africa - collide and join, yet all thirteen poems of Light the Lights connect with Africa. They are poetic re-enactments of evolutionary evidence that all human beings have origins in Africa. The poetry of Light the Lights is also a reversal of the cultural journey of St. Augustine, the 3rd century bishop of the African city of Hippo who traveled to Rome to become one of western civilization's most important and influential writers. Thus Light the Lights is a cultural journey beginning in the United States, returning to ancestral and intellectual roots in Europe, yet continuing to find them in Africa. “Not since Melvin B. Tolson's LIBRETTO FOR THE REPUBLIC OF LIBERIA has American language registered such a startling and revelatory encounter with the very idea of Africa. Charles Cantalupo's "crypt of writing" offers a space for the resurrection of the word, a hush harbor in which our drifting continents and peoples can find themselves in their origins, a place where all of us "pure mongrels of invention and recall" can at last recollect ourselves.”

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