Slow Fire

by Pamela Alexander

The poems in Slow Fire use original and compelling language to create experiences so real that the reader can inhabit them. This poet can delight in a “loitering” saxophone or a twelfth-century stone prayer hut, but much of her attention—her “eye” of close observation and precise language—is tuned to the natural world.

With a lifelong interest in ecology and outdoor experience from Maine to Arizona, Pamela Alexander incorporates specifics of desert and forest into her lines. Whatever the subject of the poem, from the death of a mother to marriage to real estate (James Merrill called her choice of subjects “impeccably democratic”), this is a book with an environmental consciousness and a liveliness of language that engages the reader on many levels.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2007

About the author

Pamela Alexander is the author of four collections of poetry including Slow Fire (Ausable/CopperCanyon, 2007). Her other books are Inland, which won an Iowa Poetry Prize (1997); Commonwealth of Wings (1991); and Navigable Waterways, which won the Yale Younger Poets prize (1984). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including American Alphabets, The Best American Poetry 2000, The Extraordinary Tide, American Voices, Poetry for a Small Planet, and Cape Discovery, and in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Orion, TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Journal, Plume, and The New Republic. Alexander’s work was included in the 1997 audio anthology One Side of the River: Poets of Cambridge and Somerville, set to music for public performance, broadcast as part of a satellite radio program, and featured on the websites of National Public Radio and the Academy of American Poets. After teaching creative writing at M.I.T. and Oberlin College for many years, she now writes poetry and nonfiction while traveling the continent in an RV with her cat. Her personal essays have appeared in Cimarron Review and The Denver Quarterly. She also writes mystery novels under the pen name Pam Fox.