The House of Blue Light is the second collection of autobiographical “memory poems” by Catholic-schoolboy-gone-bad-turned-poet-made-good David Kirby, a stand-up comic of verse if ever there was one: “in Stardust Memories . . . these wise space aliens who visit Earth . . . tell [Woody Allen] that if he really wants to serve humanity, / he should tell funnier jokes wait, that's my duty, / I think, that’s my public duty! Because sooner or later, / we all turn upside down.”

Wearing both heart and wit on his sleeve, Kirby confides in longish narrative poems events he actually or vicariously experienced–as a child, a teen, a young man, and now—as well as some future scenes he imagines. Literary theorists Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes; Little Richard and Muhammed Ali; Herman Melville, James Dickey and Henry James; friends, family, personal heroes, and acquaintances, including the Ah Oui Girl of Paris and Tige Watley’s Whoah of Baton Rouge, are all equally alive in Kirby’s poems.