Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire

“Brenda Hillman’s latest poems blaze up like matches—they dance and flicker out by the bottom of the page … Hillman’s book reminds us that one of the functions of art is to disturb: to startle us out of the ossified, inflexible forms of the routine and conventional. In this, Hillman has a particularly American genius.”—Dana Levin, Boston Review

“[A]n activist poetics that holds at its heart the obligation to renew the language and the world.”—Jerry Harp, Kenyon Review

“Brenda Hillman possesses what many contemporary poets do not: both a political imagination and a poetic conscience. She does what Rosanna Warren says poets should do more often: she ‘wrestles with the polis’ … Hillman’s mystical imagination, her exacting intelligence, and her sensuous play with words on the page often leads to a Mallarmé-like magic. These poems are about vision; like the sinewy forms in Blake’s cosmology, the elasticity of her poems require space, image, sound—well, it’s a whole new universe. Bravely, Hillman will take you there.”—Amy Pence, Colorado Review

“In Seasonal Works, perhaps the friction between the ephemeral and the eternal are the two timbers that give way to spark.”

—Erin Lyndal Martin, Rain Taxi online reviews

“Brenda Hillman is like her poems—surreptitiously wild, wordy and replete with surprising confessions.”—Lou Fancher, Contra Costa Times

“I love this book so I want to explore the grounds of my pleasures.”—Charles Altieri, Open Humanities Press

“Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire … celebrates poetry as a mode of sheer delight in the kinds of being that are committed to finding pleasure and freedom and connection as elementary conditions of being in the world.”—Charles Altieri, Open Humanities Press

“Hillman’s devotion to social justice—her unwavering belief in poetry’s capacity to address root causes of our political strife—ultimately purifies our fallen world in the languages of elemental fire.”—Karen An-Hwei Lee, The Iowa Review

“Hillman has created a book both masterful and sprawling, straightforward at times and experimental at others … [It] warrants close attention, for being urgent political poetry and so much more.”—Janna Knittel, Pleiades

“I can think of no better recent poetry than Brenda Hillman’s in its reach and ambition and serious play that widens poetic horizons … [H]er latest book—visionary, political, and ecological—encompasses a dizzying number of layers as it warms, shines, threatens, and burns.”—Michael Morse, Tikkun