The epigraph from Virginia Woolf's novel To The Lighthouse sets the tone for Todd Crawshaw's strange, daring, and beautiful collection of StoryPoems, Light-Years in the Dark. Meant for those who seek inspiration and the meaning of life, the book takes readers on a vital metaphysical and spiritual journey through both darkness and light. A StoryPoem, defined by the author, is a hybrid genre of poetry and short story inspired by Cranes' The Black Riders & Other Lines and Debussy's Preludes for Piano, where each concise piece is a cosmos, a distilled symphony. In Light-Years in the Dark, Crawshaw has invented a magical world that is elaborately imaginative, often haunting, and bursting with stunning imagery. An alternate universe alternating between lightness and darkness, a yin-yang composition of interacting forces, this collection is analogous to a rich assortment of light and dark chocolates contained in a box: each is meant to be savored slowly, carefully ingested, in a quiet space that allows for contemplation and reflection. Some short, others long, these are tales about a variety of characters, ideas, and emotions: a two-headed man, a woman of incomplete mind, a man whose life is a blur, a performing artist haunted by spirits, a waste collector who discovers a baby, an inner-city history teacher, a terrorist, and survivors. They are also about love at first sight, reflections, prophesy, amour, immortality, magic, omniscience, seduction, fear, warmth, life, death and epiphany. For more information visit www.toddcrawshaw.com.