Firefall

• Firefall is a deftly crafted lyrical meditation on the relationship between environment, the body, and the ways in which each inhabits the other. In this collection, the landscape wears our bruises, fills with our ghosts, and invites us to look inward, compare the damage. Through this lens, each poem's use of sound and repetition reminds the reader how abundant the world within and around us is, was, and could be if only we'd look at it with the right kind of attention. A quiet, necessary journey with a clear and urgent call: "do not underestimate the traces/ we have swiftly/ made of us." Lang-Cassera's writing is as powerful as it is captivating. 

-Samuel Piccone, author of Pupa (Anhinga Press, 2017), Editor's Choice in the 2017 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize

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• Once in a great while, a book comes along that alters you in ways you cannot describe. You know only that something within you has shifted, the landscape that was is no longer, and you must begin again. Heather Lang-Cassera's Fire fall will bring you to this place-to a world "stark and untamed," a place both ferocious and quiet where you will need to simultaneously reach down into the earth while bringing "the sky into the palms of [your] hands." These poems will follow you into the garden you had only allowed yourself to hope for and onto the trail you thought you knew by memory. They will stand with you on the shore when the storm approaches. They will ignite a fire within you that inspires you to begin your own quiet revolution. This is "the call of the canyon wren [descending]," the place where the "anchored nail meets the moon," your personal call to action. These poems are essential reading and will leave their mark in the best possible way.

-Letisia Cruz, author of Migrations & Other Exiles (Lost Horse Press, 2023), winner of the 2022 Idaho Prize for Poetry