From Hand to Light is a stroll, a mixed bag, an intimate notebook of possible and impossible stories and themes, a feast for the curious and avid reader. In it, Bárbara Jacobs brings together texts written over several years in which she tells us about favorite readings, authors, personalities, and painters: Holden Caulfield, Julio Cortázar, Virginia Woolf, Augusto Monterroso, Julian Barnes, Juan Carlos Onetti, Charles Simic, Saul Steinberg, José Emilio Pacheco, Alan Glass, Perla Krauze, Alba Rojo Cama, and Rafael López Castro, among many others. Notable are her magnificent essays on Jaime Sabines's letters to Josefa Rodríguez, on the difficult lives of Alcira Soust Scaffo or Onetti, or the one that talks about a poem by Ruth Whitman that the author found in a copy of Walden and that relates to another by Grace Paley, and what the underground currents of poetry mean: "That is, the poet usually knows, even if he doesn't recognize it, that poetry is the result of an act of magic: he knows that he is not the one who performs the magic, nor therefore the magician, but merely the hat from which the rabbit jumps." The author also gives us a family memory in the French Pantheon, Monterroso's brilliant travel principles, and texts—which we could call prose poetry—about bells, birds, about herself and her current moment. The texts gathered in this book comprise a poetic, a vital journey, that profound vessel from which Barbara Jacobs's extensive and rich work has emerged, from her hand to the light of the pages.