Winner of the Griffin Poetry Trust's International Poetry Prize (2014)
Runner-up for the Northern California Book Reviewers Northern California Book Award (2014)
Fire- its physical, symbolic, political, and spiritual forms-is the fourth and final subject in Brenda Hillman's masterful series on the elements. Her previous volumes-Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water-have addressed earth, air, and water. Here, Hillman evokes fire as metaphor and as event to chart subtle changes of seasons during financial breakdown, environmental crisis, and street movements for social justice; she gathers factual data, earthly rhythms, chants to the dead, journal entries, and lyric fragments in the service of a radical animism. In the polyphony of Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, the poet fuses the visionary, the political, and the personal to summon music and fire at once, calling the reader to be alive to the senses and to re-imagine a common life. This is major work by one of our most important writers. Check for the online reader's companion at brendahillman.site.wesleyan.edu.
"Brenda Hillman's latest poems blaze up like matches-they dance and flicker out by the bottom of the page... Hillman's book reminds us that one of the functions of art is to disturb: to startle us out of the ossified, inflexible forms of the routine and conventional. In this, Hillman has a particularly American genius."
Dana Levin
""I can think of no better recent poetry than Brenda Hillman's in its reach and ambition and serious play that widens poetic horizons [H]er latest book-visionary, political, and ecological-encompasses a dizzying number of layers as it warms, shines, threatens, and burns.""
Michael Morse
""Hillman has created a book both masterful and sprawling, straightforward at times and experimental at others [It] warrants close attention, for being urgent political poetry and so much more.""
