Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volume II

by Julie Weiss

If you loved The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, you´re in for another tantalizing treat.

The pages of Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volume II are roaring. Julie Weiss will make you hunger for “café con leche,” “caramel- dipped / castaña de mazapán,” deep-fried churros dipped into “an ecstasy of chocolate.” This collection enchants and aches. I am obsessed with these lovers and the world they inhabit, the “gasp of mountains / in slumber, voluptuous under snow- woven / blankets.” Weiss has left me teetering, and “I'd risk it all again and again.”

—Allison Blevins, author of Cataloguing Pain

Echoing the secret desire every poet has to enter a sacred space, to write about love in a way that pulls the reader in, instead of puckering the mouth with too-sweet clichés, this collection is as rich and decadent as the “caramel-dipped / castaña de mazapán seducing your tongue.” This is a collection to be read tenderly, whispering in the ear of a lover, at a seaside picnic, or on a rainy day remembering that one. Julie Weiss pays homage to Adrienne Rich, but also Pablo Neruda, and Amy Lowell, in a most devastatingly beautiful way.

—Danèlle Lejuane, author of Landlocked: Etymology of Whale-Fish and Grace

A sexy and lyrical ride, and wild one too—careening at times like a steam locomotive, and at other times like a dragon in fiery “breath ablaze.” Hang on tight. These poems charge forth from the inspiration of Adrienne Rich’s love poems into remote and tempestuous territories, a firestorm of passion and wisdom. Through her poetry, Julie Weiss creates an aching invocation of romantic love between two women, “beautiful / as a revolution.”

—Karen Poppy, author of Diving At The Lip Of The Water

Paperback

Published February 20, 2024

About the author

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay books, and two chapbooks, The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volume II, both published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in February 2025 with Kelsay Books. Her "Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children" was selected as a finalist for Sundress´s 2023 Best of the Net anthology. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for her poem "Cumbre Vieja," was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Prize, and was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work appears in Sky Island Journal, ONE ART, and Chestnut Review, among others. Originally from California, she lives in Spain with her wife and two young children. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/.