on Fire Season by Joseph Lease

By Sheila E. Murphy

I have lived with Fire Season throughout its gestation, observing the patience, confidence, and integrity with which Joseph Lease has shepherded this book into being. While virtually all poets edit their work, Lease is profoundly committed to exactness as he sculpts each poem...

On Joseph Lease's Fire Season

Chax Press | 2023
reviewed by Sheila E. Murphy

I have lived with Fire Season throughout its gestation, observing the patience, confidence, and integrity with which Joseph Lease has shepherded this book into being. While virtually all poets edit their work, Lease is profoundly committed to exactness as he sculpts each poem. I have witnessed his frequent and continual shifting of which words and passages belong, of their placement on the page, while honoring newly emerging language, as Lease navigates ongoing revision with faithful care.

In parallel with Lease's composition process, rereading Fire Season reveals a poet whose fundamental practice is always questioning, remaking, and listening, thereby offering a prescient depiction of an increasingly distorted and painful world marked by both the global devastations of our climate crisis and the personal loss of his parents. Lease maintains a tough and tender accuracy throughout all he depicts. Disturbing events—such as the California fires of 2025, escalating political horrors, and predatory divisiveness worldwide—have increased exponentially since the publication of Fire Season. The elegiac essence of the book is both personal and urgently systemic, calling out a greed-racked culture that violates our planet's sacredness and our very spirit—both communally and individually. This volume's power draws us with urgency to commit to healing our individual psyche and our shared ecology to make building inclusive and sustainable community possible.

In Fire Season, love coexists with rampant destruction of the earth and social systems. "Kisses / that we share across the sky" remain more real than the horror, even as it eclipses those fragile moments and features of experience (17). Lines such as "(he said violet, blue / wind / pushes river light, birches" sing to the reader the chastening power of love and nature, despite the terror of the projected end (21).

Early in the book, Lease depicts a compelling portrait of a "tough," father who embodies strength while demonstrating an enduring love, sensing on his deathbed the presence of his own mother as he squeezes his son's hand. The son embraces the father's reality in that moment, telling the father that his mother loves him:

(he hates "sentimental slop" (hold
his hand, he's from Coney Island,
he's tougher
than you
(he says, when I squeeze your hand
(I'm squeezing her hand
(his mother in the room (his
mother's me (tell him (tell
him (your mother
loves you (riding death (23-24)

The vehicle of the ever-open left parentheses effectively leads the reader to each next perception, one characterized by an apt openness and a refusal of closure. Each breath moves to each new piece of language evocative of a longer history. Lease honors the mother's abiding presence while acknowledging the reality that she is gone, that she metaphorizes our planet in danger, and that, on both levels, the inner child is left with loss.

In "Falling," a parallel expression of the poet's grief for his own dead mother (the wonderful poet Miriam Lease, to whom this book is dedicated) resonates with a sense of the loss of God and a once-sacred recognition of ecology.

(we touch the gone voice
bent in half (and mom is
green and she is dead
and she is
where oh where
(she was
the search
for God
(for love
(the summer
wind
(the starry
night (53-55)

The poem brings together multiple dimensions of the mother who was everything to the speaker: "(the search / for God / for love" (54). Throughout Fire season, the poems acknowledge that each of us belongs to a shared universe, beginning with the early love of parents who form for us, in us, a world always threaded with ubiquitous death—the constant and certain unknown.

In the father's voice, we hear impressions of the earth, the horror of violations against it: "our lifestyle is wrecking the / planet for Christ's sake" (26). We learn of the father as a man who lives in love and who is no fool, calling out angrily the wrecking of the universe at the hand of narrow, self-interested perspectives that neglect a larger, connected human reality. It is important to point out that the poems in Fire Season do not presume an unduly simplistic view of the world. We sense from the book that the harsh natural world, replete with survival needs among many living beings, remains the context for human actions. The very brutality we see in humans is not unique to our species, yet as humans we can hope to discern paths that might lead to a larger, purposeful, mutually beneficial, interconnected ecosystem.

The poems further depict the grieving speaker's anxieties and sense of guilt for what "we" are doing to the very planet that sustains our life: "(we / killed the / animals" (48). The parent in this poem authors hope in the child, who chimes the powerful need to craft and relate "your story," acknowledging, "(I have to "make it up" (43). The "cream light / cream thick / purple / clouds" represent a surface reality of the "fire clouds" that signify devastation and extinction (43 and 48, respectively). The poet's moral compass, imparted by his parents, make it imperative for him to speak truth against the continual assaults on us and our planet. The text suggests that moral strength can cause dividing lines to evaporate in the face of its power.

The poem "In a Field" functions as a pivot in the book. This poem's tender, lyrical passages express a desire to merge with nature while lamenting its destruction: "I wore / the rain that rose and fell like light (I / wore the snow that piled up by the / gate / I wrote the secret number on my hand / I write the secret number / in my eye . . ." (37) Here, the speaker takes hold of nature by way of writing. The active voice heightens the sense of engagement, a prayer in honor of what is possible, culminating in "(I dreamed the dream that dropped me in the sun" (37).

The poem "Now What" more explicitly transitions to the shattering of the world: "(the / world flew away (like / light" (63). The dream of what should have been possible is splintered and on the threshold of being destroyed. A short series of passages reveres the unification of snow falling across the land. Earth broken into pieces lifts off, and the sacramental reality of that brokenness is shared by every living thing. The solitude of the person left behind is very much one with nature, reporting that:

(and the world fell (I walked in the
trees (in the shadows of the trees (the
world flew (the world flew away (like light (63)

What does this book bring to the reader?

First, the notion that an early foundation of honesty and love in a child's life can frame trust, care, and respect. The child in this book sees a "tough" father who is equally tender, loving, and aware of his own mother as the central reality, allowing the imagination to act as healer amid horror. That foundation of abiding love can prepare the adult to confront attacks on beauty and sacredness.

Second, Fire Season paints a no-holds-barred picture of a world made increasingly treacherous by "corpse light," asking "will we / kill the world?" (76-77). The book expresses grief for deceased parents and an increasingly impacted planet, witnessing the horrors of climate change while trying to frame and formulate how to think, how to feel, how to contribute something more conscience-driven and real. The painful truth of an apocalyptic reality raises constant questions for the reader of this important work.

There is no guarantee that we will be equipped to take on the monstrous enemies of life as we know it should be.

And even as the book exemplifies a powerful elegy for a world in pain, it reaffirms a truth that Joyce made plain in "The Dead": the departed never leave us. Honoring loved ones means never letting go of the impressions gifted us by touch, by signal, by word. Those who have left us can be, at times, far more vivid than those who remain. This book testifies that love is an integral force for learning who we are and for taking up what we want to do and what we must do.

Throughout the book, fire represents not only natural destruction but also the greed behind it, propelled beyond what the mind can easily conceive, threatening even the soul. And what is the soul, Lease asks repeatedly? Perhaps it is what evinces a future desired yet also impossible amid rage.

The concluding words cry out both fact and feeling:

(the animals
are dead, are dying (mom,
you read the books to me, and
I tried
(my legs are trembling, my hands are
trembling (believe me, don't believe
me, I don't care (I was the future, says
the nothing man (I was the future for
a day or two (93-94)

Such a reality derives from the nearly invisible but ubiquitous architects of greed even as we harken back to the mother's gentle reading of books that brought about a hope for a future—not too much to ask, yet dramatically different from the imagined future.

Throughout Fire Season, the speaker urgently seeks to respond and act in conscience with full awareness of the climate crisis. Reading Lease's powerful book convinces this reader of the strength of poetry. The exploration is necessary work, deep work, work contagious with urgency. How then does the power of enduring love fare against the titular Fire Season? Ultimately, poetry attests to the fact that the imagination is an enduring act against a paralyzing future. Speaking truth vividly and honestly is perhaps the sole way of facing the fire.

Published 06/02/2025

Bio:

Sheila E. Murphy has had poems appear in Verse Daily, Poetry, Hanging Loose, Fortnightly Review. Forthcoming books in 2025-2026: Escritoire (Lavender Ink), October Sequence 52-122 (Chax Press), and a collection from Unlikely Books. Most recent book: Permission to Relax (BlazeVOX Books, 2023). Received the Gertrude Stein Poetry Award for Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Hay(ha)ku Book Prize for Reporting Live From You Know Where (Meritage Press, 2018). Her Wikipedia page can be here.

on The Ruins of Nostalgia by Donna Stonecipher

By Jane Yager

Donna Stonecipher's latest collection, The Ruins of Nostalgia, is a cycle of 64 prose poems on the theme of nostalgia, set largely in Berlin and Seattle, in which most of the poems end with the refrain "the ruins of nostalgia." Both archaeological and mesmeric, the book excavates strata of nostalgic objects...

On Donna Stonecipher's The Ruins of Nostalgia

Wesleyan University Press | 2023
reviewed by Jane Yager

Donna Stonecipher's latest collection, The Ruins of Nostalgia, is a cycle of 64 prose poems on the theme of nostalgia, set largely in Berlin and Seattle, in which most of the poems end with the refrain "the ruins of nostalgia." Both archaeological and mesmeric, the book excavates strata of nostalgic objects while conjuring the specific longings that make up nostalgia. In this book, nostalgia is an indulgence, an ailment, and a peculiar music. It is perilous and deeply human.

The first poem hypnotically intones: "Courtyard opened out into courtyard opened out into courtyard." This dreamlike rhythm belies the two prosaic forces the poem details. In Berlin, where Stonecipher has lived for the past two decades, an art gallery is closing; in Seattle, her childhood home, a bookstore is going out of business. "At this bookstore, courtyard after courtyard had opened in her mind," the speaker recalls, but in this poem, cultural institutions are dying of rising rents in both her home cities.

Stonecipher's speaker bristles at the truism "One door closes, another opens," as invoked to dismiss any sense of loss by placing these changes within an eternal symmetry of "the market." On the terrain of The Ruins of Nostalgia, nothing exists in any such balance or proportion. Nostalgic objects pile up and overflow; the layers of the past shift underfoot, making for unstable ground; and buildings groan beneath structural problems. "She was reluctant to admit she felt nostalgic for symmetry," the speaker confesses amidst the asymmetry of "an unjust world trashed with lopsided stuff." The reluctance here to admit a longing for a past aesthetic is reflective of the poet's stance throughout the book: fully aware of nostalgia's dangers, yet just as unable to resist its lures as the rest of us.

Nostalgia turns space into time and time into space. Like an infinitely repeating series of doors in a painting, it generates an illusion of space, entrancing and self-referential. Stonecipher wonders, "Do we all crack out of our lives as we live on, trying to understand what we have lived through in retrospect as spatial?" If so, we need linear time to turn our pasts into the stuff of nostalgia: "the pasts we have cracked out of can't be idealized if we can't turn around and look at them getting smaller and smaller in the distance behind us."

This idealizing of the past makes nostalgia more pleasurable, but also more deceptive, than memory or history. "Remembering is one of the few political acts both radical and tedious," the speaker declares, whereas nostalgia—neither radical nor tedious—feels cozy, is nestled into. It has a treacherous lightness; nostalgia "felt weightless, a tiny black-lacquered snuffbox inlaid with golden scenes, beautiful and detrimental, that we could carry with us effortlessly from room to room and even out into the world waiting to infect us with feeling." In contrast, the labor of mourning a lost loved one is a "roomful of heavy cardboard boxes of regret. A roomful of heavy cardboard boxes of grief."

A Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, coined the term "nostalgia" in 1688. It initially described "an illness with a prescribed cure: opium, leeches, a view of the sufferer's home." Stonecipher treats nostalgia as a circular affliction, insatiable in its cycle of healing and infecting: "the only cure for nostalgia is nostalgia. There is an illness informing the illness, and that illness must be mined to extract the exquisitely atavistic elixir." Nostalgia itself is opium and leech.

Beyond both languishing in nostalgia and critiquing it, Stonecipher also reveals it as something more than an ailment: a rhythm, one that prose poetry as a genre is uniquely capable of rendering. Like the first-person plural "we" voice that narrates many of these pieces, and like prose poetry itself, nostalgia is both individual and collective—we all feel longing, algia, but differ in our particular lost home, nostos. One piece opens in a blunt prose register: "We did not know anyone who had grown up in our neighborhood who could now afford to live in our neighborhood." Remembering the changes the neighborhood's houses had undergone at the hand of gentrification, it soars into the lyrical: "They gained second stories, third stories, picture windows and skylights, hot tubs and balconies, gained terraces and gardens, lost yards, lost rhododendrons, gained sedge and lavender, lost juniper bushes, gained butterfly bushes and chard." The stark prose of capital's effects on the city reverberates against the incantatory spell of poetry. Each piece expresses the poetic voice of individual interiority, the music of its accretions and repetitions, and at the same time engages in a prose narrative's confrontation with the concerns of the collective.

Stonecipher's knowledge of the German language courses below the surface of the poems as interlinguistic word play. Himmel, both sky and heaven, is at play when she teases a description of the blue sky in a Caspar David Friedrich painting into a meditation on utopia as a "cracked fragile blue heavenly state." As sky becomes heaven and heaven becomes utopia, space slides into time. The book is littered with the detritus of past utopian visions, reminders that the striving for an ideal place always ends in ruin, and: "It's no wonder the Spaniards never found El Dorado, since it is always located behind us." The word prägen—used to describe both the inventing of words and the minting of currency—haunts her riff on money "Nostalgia coins sentiment into durable objects…. The profiles on gold coins, we could say, coined the obliquity of greed." Capital turns feelings and objects into one another and gives them all an unsettling immortality. That nostalgic objects endure is a recurrent theme in the book. When the houses of her childhood neighborhood in Seattle are torn down to make way for more profitable new builds, "the unprofitable houses did not disappear: they accumulated like strata of sedimented geologic time in the minds of those who would never be free of them." Nothing ever really goes away. And in one piece, the speaker calls museums "repositories of our collective marcescence," encapsulating the artificial longevity in which museum objects are suspended, and its kinship with nostalgia.

Most poignant of the German concepts flickering through The Ruins of Nostalgia is versunkene Welt, a term for a lost place or time that calls it a literal sunken world, often used in reference to the GDR. Several of the poems deal with its nostalgic objects that linger in Berlin. But the motif of submersion extends beyond this context: one past era has "drowned like a city sacrificed to a dam." Nostalgia operates as a "dysfunctional gift economy whose items stop circulating when recollections are collected into infinitesimal trunks that glitter once and then are sunk to the bottom of the mind for safekeeping." Circulating in an economy yet sunk deep within the individual's mind, its objects impossible to recover but never truly gone, nostalgia thrums with a beguiling tension. By harnessing the musicality of this tension, Stonecipher has written an immensely rich and powerful work.

At several points, the poet references Goethe's phrase, Stay, thou art so fair: the fatal words that Faust utters to express the impossible wish for a fleeting moment to linger, thereby losing his wager with the devil. Faust speaks the words to a moment, but Stonecipher's voice speaks them to a city. The concept of nostalgia is mapped onto the spatial experience of her two home cities. Berlin and Seattle become poetic case studies in nostalgia, and through them we see that in this book, nostalgia is many things: It is a malady, as Johannes Hofer first postulated in the seventeenth century. It is a mirage, one that entraps nostalgists and leaves them "falling over and over through the hourglass reversed into perpetuity." And however false nostalgia's promises, the losses that make it appealing—the death of a loved one, the vanishing of a childhood home, the closing of a bookstore—are very real. Amidst all these different notions of nostalgia and its ruinations, one thing that remains constant is the speaker's stance, deeply empathetic to the reasons we feel nostalgia, yet unsparing in its admonition: Make no mistake, the fair moment will not linger.

Published 06/02/2025

Bio:

Jane Yager is a Berlin-based writer and translator from California. Her criticism has appeared in publications including the Times Literary Supplement and the Paris Review Daily and her creative work in Narratively, The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere. You can find her at janeyager.com.

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