Betsy Fagin
Fires Seen from Space
$20.00 | November 2024 | ISBN 978-1-959708-11-7
In stock
Ships on November 12, 2024Betsy Fagin’s third book of poems dwells in the interstices of profound grief and abject wonder, softening into the complexities of human-driven extinction in search of what refuge remains for life in the pyrocene.
Bearing witness to present calamities, Fires Seen from Space investigates impermanence within planetary poly-crisis. Through ekphrastic poems and engagements with older texts, Fagin discovers enchantment within disintegrating forms and corrupted systems. These poems celebrate moments of simplicity and ease while facing catastrophic change, weaving deep relational webs to bind isolated efforts of resistance.
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Fires Seen from Space always implies our isolated human hive within the Uranian. Indeed, a smidgen over four light years from our closest Sun implies our trenchant isolation where even partial light travel reeks of impossibility, where “statements statements prevailing against dark times” remain frail reminder of our present circumstance.
—Will Alexander
Betsy Fagin is one of the poets I turn to in times of political, environmental, and humanitarian crisis—essentially, all times. Only an imagination so deeply grounded in the body can be free enough to imagine such new and spacious forms of autonomy. And, she doesn’t leave us there without resources. Her ideas about the role of care in the daily struggles faced by the autonomous against those who seek to rule them are incredibly generous. Fagin draws our attention to the present moment, reminding us that “the small things” are everything, such as experiencing our hearts beat, or breathing air that “is an interface where relationship begins.” Fires Seen from Space affirms that poetry is a form of care and a vessel where poets have been stowing vital knowledge for many millennia.
—Stacy Szymaszek
Fires seen from space, as inextinguishable ardors, as manifold extinctions that persist. In Betsy Fagin’s poems, cosmogonic breath burns, and yet also the gravity of terrestrial resistance. “Life in another place,” in the country that lies beyond the half-lived life, in a life that is never “ours”: the other life that must be reinvented.
—Giovanbattista Tusa
Such sleek, smart poems—missives from an adrift future, beyond regret, their surfaces smooth as glass and just as shocking when you smack into one mid-flight. To me, this is a book about forces, both the passive entropy we pretend characterizes nature and the pushing forward we assign ourselves: all of our “scissor play among / ancient cut forests / and melted down paradise.” Or it’s about how we’re stuck choosing which swift-moving current we’ll struggle against and which we’ll let take us—mutually aided or not—further into a world that “pairs well with basic / survival fears.” This mesmerizing book taught me a strange lesson—something like, whatever you bring your focus to immediately loses or gains power—there’s no in-between, “no moving forward, / no moving back.” And yet: “I declare / I am determined to see everything / everywhere, in everyone.”
—Jacqueline Waters
Thinking with stanzas. Betsy Fagin’s prosodic tour de force returns us again and again to the emergencies we live among and the almost unbearable beauty we stand to lose. Fires Seen from Space stands foursquare for liberation, revolution, and love. “You are beautiful. // Your planet is beautiful. // And all of it will burn—it’s burning now.”
—Kevin Davies