Slow Fire

Pamela Alexander

“The poems in Slow Fire are filled with a profound dialogue with the rain, earth, and American culture; they command the reader to dig deep inside our own lives to face our gains, losses and fears. Alexander writes with jolted precision of many things and reminds us that we simply cannot live in a community of one… [T]his poet is blessed.” —B.L. Kennedy, B.L’s Drive-By

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ISBN: 9781931337342

Format: Paperback

Moonset

Something stirs: perhaps a farm dog
gruff behind the darkness of tall corn,
or roosters ruffled in their sleep
by dreams of dawn. Impossible
to see the steep black road; his feet
feel it out. No sound
but gravel, sometimes, shifting
under his boot. Too late, too late

to sleep. Fog dims a streetlight
like a lampshade; in the milky cone
his shadow stands beside him.
He set out under clouds luminous
with a full moon; now, red, it melts
at the horizon.

                    The hills catch
whispers of light from the west,
from east. A day he should welcome—
lovely, the red moon going under, fields
just visible, undulating in mist—
and he will, though he sees it’s too late
to have a life he cares about.

About the Author

Pamela Alexander is the author of four collections of poetry including Slow Fire (Ausable/CopperCanyon, 2007). Her other books are Inland, which won an Iowa Poetry Prize (1997); Commonwealth of Wings (1991); and Navigable Waterways, which won the Yale Younger Poets prize (1984). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including American Alphabets, The Best American Poetry 2000, The Extraordinary Tide, American Voices, Poetry for a Small Planet, and Cape Discovery, and in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Orion, TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Journal, Plume, …

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Reviews

“She is the soul of a Walden-ish total immersion in nature in Ontario, Canada and Ohio, finding inner peace and sanity and leaving the contemporary world behind as much as possible, becoming the un-peopled world around her, although the people-world still keeps haunting her thoughts—which makes her escaping even more meaningful.” —Small Press Review

“In her astonishingly original fourth book, Pamela Alexander continues the exploration of the earth and its elements begun in… Navigable Waterways [for which she was awarded The Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize]. The fire of the title is most explicitly the body’s ‘slow burn, cell-fire,’ but the book itself burns with an urgency that is both expansive and deep. Packed with linguistic delights and surprises that leave no room for the reading mind to go slack, the book begins with grief and moves through a wide range of human emotion that includes genuinely witty responses to love both lost and found, exploration and deliberate disorientation of the personal and linguistic self, and outrage at the materialism of American culture.” —Martha Collins