Firefall

Firefall, by Heather Lang-Cassera, whispers to us the urgency of climate change. In hushed tones, lyrical free verse and cyclical pantoums evoke the diminishing and intensifying seasons. We might look for comfort in the occasional rhyming couplets, in the evocative syntax, in the breathtaking imagery that portrays the beauty of this world, yet these ecopoems require us to parse out seeming dualities: fire and flood, repetition and redundancy, vulnerable witness and autonomous self. Exploring the complexity of language in advocacy and activism, both the tangible effects and the dangers of mere performance, Firefall quietly begs us to consider the wisdom of our own hands as "a birth cry, a death breathing, an intangible / sun, a heap of inconsolable hope / available only from yesterdays" as well as the ways in which each "voice is a comet / electric."