“In her astonishingly original fourth book, Pamela Alexander continues the exploration of the earth and its elements begun in the Navigable Waterways of her first. The fire of the title is most explicitly the body’s ‘slow burn, cell-fire,’ but the book itself burns with an urgency that is both expansive and deep. Packed with linguistic delights and surprises that leave no room for the reading mind to go slack, the book begins with grief and moves through a wide range of human emotion that includes genuinely witty responses to love both lost and found, exploration and deliberate disorientation of the personal and linguistic self, and outrage at the materialism of American culture. But the most compelling movement of the book lies in its increasingly profound dialogue with the earth itself.”
—Martha Collins
   

REVIEWS & COMMENTS

“What is there to say or write about Pamela Alexander that has not already been said or written? We can tell you that she is the author of three previous collections of poetry, tell you that she has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and has been a Yale Younger Poets recipient, and leave it at that because, in my opinion, those are pretty big credentials. This is a hardcore poet whose new collection of poetry, Slow Fire, speaks for itself with linguistic delight, leaving the reader begging for more of what she sells. The poems in Slow Fire are filled with a profound dialogue with the rain, earth and American culture; they command the reader to dig deep inside our own lives to face our gains, losses and fears. Alexander writes with jolted precision of many things and reminds us that we simply cannot live in a community of one. It is for that message alone that this poet is blessed. I can only add three more words… BUY THIS BOOK!” —B.L. Kennedy, B.L.'s Drive-By

“She is the soul of a Walden-ish total immersion in Nature in Ontario, Canada and Ohio, finding inner peace and sanity and leaving the contemporary world behind as much as possible, becoming the unpeopled world around her, although the people – world still keeps haunting her thoughts – which makes her escaping even more meaningful.” —Small Press Review, July-August 2007