Fire Season

Joseph Lease' s Fire Season, composed in the heat of global and personal apocalypse, is one of the most intimate books I've ever encountered. " I'm writing inside death, I'm / in the room." Anyone who comes this close to death succumbs to its power to eradicate all pretense. Lease's language is simple, direct: " what is real / (maybe sunlight / (my mother's face." Words reappear like recurring dreams, brilliantly embodying Jack Spicer's dictum: " A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary." The prosody here is tightly structured yet raw, employing a subtle lyricism that at times turns insistent, tugging the reader's sleeve like an urgent child. Open parentheses permeate the text like stutters or ruptured membranes. They connect, shield, spill, but never ever close. Fire Season is achingly beautiful. Halfway through my first read I started crying. -- Dodie Bellamy