Overview

In Derek Annis' River City Fires, you'll travel through surreal geographies that are equal parts terrestrial and intimate.In this haunting and complex collection, Derek Annis unearths a surreal geography of trauma. These traumas are both personal and planetwide, spanning different ecologies and personal concerns. Annis' word choice and language are ethereal but focused. Their singular voice the hidden, otherworldly parts of our ecosystem, turning them over with specificity and attention. River City Fires is confessional poetry viewed through a hazy kaleidoscope. Simultaneously dreamlike and concrete, Annis connects the macro geographies of earth with the intimate geographies of revealed traumas. This stunning collection will resonate with anyone looking for poems about place that still feel personal. This collection also features a bespoke interview with the writer at then end of the book, delving deeper into the craft, influences, and life behind their work.

Full Product Details

9781949065299

Table of Contents

Reviews

""To make of bewilderment itself a world serviceable enough to live in-to imagine a way through: this seems the chief imperative of River City Fires, whose astonishing poems hover around fires both actual and metaphorical in a landscape/riverscape/forestscape both recognizable and surreal. These are poems whose meanings I can't always parse-and I don't feel I'm supposed to; instead, they seem like slant confessions, not of trauma, but from trauma; they articulate the triumph of survival, they fragment what's whole and, instead of restoring it, reimagine the possibilities for wholeness. 'Blessed are the burned. The blistered/inherit the earth.' A terrific collection."" -Carl Phillips, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry ""River City Fires is beautiful, elemental, and oracular. It's as steeped in threat as any fable or holy book, and the darkness is forever manifesting into fears and friends. Like the book of Proverbs armed with a rifle, every poem transforms themselves at each line break's dire revelations. Surreal and archetypal, this city and its fires speak (as many fires do) to god, asking 'make death/turn away.' These poems will haunt you with the most gorgeous aching."" -Traci Brimhall, author of our lady of the ruins

Author Information

Derek Annis (they/he) is a neurodivergent poet from the Inland Northwest. He is the author of Neighborhood of Gray Houses (Lost Horse Press) and an editor for Lynx House Press. Their poems have appeared in The Account, Colorado Review, Epiphany, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review Online, Spillway, Third Coast, and many other journals. Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North (2024) and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022); and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Tab Content 6

Countries Available