“In her astonishingly original fourth book, Pamela Alexander continues the exploration of the earth and its elements begun in the Navigable Waterways of her first. The fire of the title is most explicitly the body’s ‘slow burn, cell-fire,’ but the book itself burns with an urgency that is both expansive and deep. Packed with linguistic delights and surprises that leave no room for the reading mind to go slack, the book begins with grief and moves through a wide range of human emotion that includes genuinely witty responses to love both lost and found, exploration and deliberate disorientation of the personal and linguistic self, and outrage at the materialism of American culture. But the most compelling movement of the book lies in its increasingly profound dialogue with the earth itself.”
—Martha Collins
   

REVIEWS & COMMENTS

“She is the soul of a Walden-ish total immersion in Nature in Ontario, Canada and Ohio, finding inner peace and sanity and leaving the contemporary world behind as much as possible, becoming the unpeopled world around her, although the people – world still keeps haunting her thoughts – which makes her escaping even more meaningful.” —Small Press Review, July-August 2007