Kate Zambreno’s Lessons in Looking

Kate Zambreno’s The Light Room is a book of boxes, surfaces, and close observation, set during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. The book is divided into several distinct sections: the first, “Light Boxes,” is the most intimate, pairing scenes of the close and cluttered domestic interior with outings to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, which serves as a school and a sanctuary. Through accumulation, a portrait of the early days of the pandemic—and of parenting a newborn—emerges. Zambreno’s eye in these moments is fine-tuned: The impression is of dust motes illuminated in a ray of light. “The snow is so beautiful,” Zambreno writes. “I watch it from the window. It falls so fast. The baby is asleep on me. Her body is changing. The circle of fat at her wrist is disappearing. Soon she will be toddling after her sister, building cities.”