Review
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Title: Brighter and Brighter until the Perfect Day
Author: Sharlee Mullins Glenn
Publisher: BCC Press
Year Published: 2025
Pages: 94
ISBN: 1961471205
Genre: Epic poetry
Reviewed by Theric Jepson
It’s a funny thing to read a book so quickly to remember all its typos (a misturned apostrophe and, hilariously, a 0 instead of a -, a simple misplaced figure suddenly creating in the acknowledgements a chapter 107 of Moses). But those are obviously minor things. Especially when we are speaking of a new epic poem covering much the same ground as Paradises both Lost and Regained in a fraction of the space. And it’s a deeply Latter-day Saint rendering. For the endowed reader, it will be impossible to read without constant internal crossreferencing.
Largely, I think it is successful as a story, as a work of verse, and as a work of speculative theology. Some commonly proposed solutions to uncertain identity (eg, what if the heavenly Mother is the Holy Ghost?) are part of this story; the most talked-about aspect of the book (or, for me at least, the most heard-about aspect) is its feminism. Specifically that Elohim is plural (as, you know, it is), interpreted as the Gods male and female both (which, in my [unaskedfor] opinion, is proper interpretation), and that more premortal characters beside Michael (viz., including women) are given names and responsibilities.
All that is great, but it also leads into my sole problem with this book. I’ve no issue with any of the speculation—I don’t agree with it all equally but it’s all valid and reasonable and exciting and decidedly noncrazy—but I do take issue with one character: Ora.
Ora is one of the more advanced premortal spirits. It’s not stated so, but I get the sense she was probably #3 behind Jehovah and Lucifer. And she independently comes up with the concept of the Holy Ghost and offers to do it herself before the Parents reveal that Mother will lay down her body for a time to play this role herself. I found this aspect interesting but unsettling. But then Ora is foreordained to be the prophet to restore knowledge of Heavenly Mother in the latter days. This of itself is fine but it was impossible not to read this without considering the possibility that the author of the text, the inventor of Ora, was setting herself up as Ora. Now, given what I know of Sharlee Mullins Glenn (incidentally, I read another fine book of hers about a week ago), I think a better reading would be an impassioned plea for this prophet’s arrival, but there’s something about Ora’s presentation that really feels like a lot of arrows pointing straight back at themselves. I found it kinda weird and offputting. But, as I said, otherwise, in my opinion, this poem is excellent, perhaps even vital. Poe said a poem can only be a good poem if read in one sitting. I read this in two with a break of perhaps two hours inbetween and I was still able to experience the “totality, or unity, of effect” that Brighter and Brighter has to offer. Her wielding of blank verse is wonderfully adept and, in short, this poem must by any reasonable standard be considered a great success.
Props also to the BCC Press team for a lovely book. The cover art by J. Kirk Richards and interior illos by Sara Forbush support the text wonderfully.
This is a slender volume and, I think, approachable. Not that I’m expecting it to be a blank-verse bestseller or anything, but I suspect anyone who might give it a shot will find their way in and be able to have an experience.
Let them who have ears to hear, etc etc.
Anyway, I liked it.