paper • 88 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-961897-36-6
eISBN: 978-1-961897-37-3
March 2025 • Poetry
Winner of the 2025 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry selected by Pulitzer Prize recipient Diane Seuss, The Fire Passage is a lyric descent in the epic tradition, traveling unto realms unmoored by extreme weather and mysterious illness before resurfacing to the light of a world remade. Recording her experience of a health crisis amid continuous natural disaster, poet Lisa Wells recontextualizes biblically scaled plagues as the entropic catastrophes of our late-stage capitalist society. “I was sick, plainly. / I had my symptoms.” Confronted with the disbelief and “skeptical pity” of medical professionals, Wells brilliantly illuminates the psychological exile of illness where patients, “turned out by the body,” find themselves on “malignancy’s forced pilgrimage.” The passage she travels is a gauntlet of flame, a path guarded by gatekeepers who acted “as if the wound were in [her] mind.” (“And it was. But it was elsewhere, too.”) This book serves as the answer to a query posed by bad-faith actors and the insightful dream-self alike: “so the wound is a window?” These pages convey grim comfort and radical optimism at once, reminding, “Friend, we die, but do not die alone.” They insist on an affirmative practice of responding to rhetorical questions, building solidarity among the weary who call out, ensuring that they—that we—are not alone with silence. “It comes for all? // It comes for all.” Despite its frank acknowledgment of fire’s lethal nature, the fortifying poetics of this book never preclude the possibility of resurrection or lose their focus on rebuilding a better world from the ashes of this one. “Do not shrink from That Which / razed the scab, will / fertilize the disturbance,” Wells commands us. She entreats us to measure up to a corrective future. “Already its great wave breaks / against the mangroves. // Let us go / and greet it.”
From The Fire Passage
12.
Is it Eden I long for?
A bayou at dusk, glitzy with fireflies
where rising tides arouse the wharves.
I am engirdled in the plastic rings
of every sixer I ever shotgunned.
Reliving the all-day drunks,
fucked thrice before sundown.
My nostalgia stumps me.
“I lived in terror and I loved the world.” This is a primary tension in Lisa Wells’ sublime The Fire Passage, which tracks an odyssey, in language at once apocalyptic, rapturous, erotic, and absurd, from flood, to fire, to air. The Fire Passage is an epic, in structure and scale, in physical, and metaphysical ambition. Wells has lowered her bucket into the Gilgamesh well, has drawn up the waters of Dante, and revived the archetypes required to confront our deadly contemporary moment. Within the epic frame, Wells offers a remarkable lyric sensibility, with a miniaturist’s eye for the startling, precise, even delicate image. “Sores, in precise succession, throbbing along / a child’s spine like the buttoned closure of a dress,” she writes. And elsewhere, “A bayou at dusk, glitzy with fireflies / where rising tides arouse the wharves.” At times, she punctures the illusion of timelessness by dropping in a pop cultural reference—“Their keeper was a blowsy girl in Princess Leia buns”—or places us, with a moment of American vernacular: “In the unfortunate dive bar of daughters / descendent of daughters / you must dance with the one that brung you,” she writes, and names Laughlin, Nevada, the “asshole of the planet.” She does not strand us, however, in Laughlin, nor any of its iterations. This is a pilgrimage, primarily, of the Word. “That Which spoke the dream into my ear / spoke out of my body / spoke me out,” she writes, offering us the possibility of lyric rebirth. “This human way is abrupt as a brick shithouse / but down in that dismal pit the slag / fosters heaps of flowers.” In The Fire Passage, Lisa Wells has given us a masterful template for grief, survival, and transformation.