Brief Light is a collection of short poems meditating on human experience, largely but not exclusively through traditional poetic forms. Their bent is simultaneously lyric and narrative, as if novels had been compressed into fourteen lines and peopled by quiet, inward-looking characters. A reader writes, "Sally Thomas is one of the best American poets writing. Her direct language, skillful use of irony, mastery of form, and quietly compassionate voice combine to give her work a humane ethos absent from much contemporary poetry and sorely needed in our world today."