Fires in the Dark

Fires in the Dark is Anca Vlasopolos's eighth poetry collection. You'll find 75 poems in this volume-13 previously published and 62 which appear in print for the first time. In the author's own words, "I meant to dedicate this collection to one of my best readers and dear friend Deborah Robbins. Time's chariot crushed my intention, so this has become instead an in memoriam homage. She did see the last poem, and sent me a response, out of which I culled the epigraph for this volume. Two poems frame this gathering: the first ("See Them Rise") commemorates people whose sufferings and courage fuse with our resolve to rise and fight the dark; the last ("Fires in Darkness") is a meditation about a cosmos we mostly cannot understand and whose unimaginably minute particles light up in dance. In between there is the sans of aging and loss-of friends, love(s), our (perhaps only dreamed of) green and pleasant Earth but also awe and surprise at life's exuberant sprezzatura of mortality."