Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire - Paperback

by Brenda Hillman (Author)

The final volume in the poet's extraordinary tetralogy on earth, air, water, and fire

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.

Author Biography

BRENDA HILLMAN is an activist, writer, and teacher. She has published nine collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press, including Practical Water, for which she won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. Hillman serves on the faculty of Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California, as the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry.