What do you think?
Rate this book
Blue Flame
Emily Pettit is not afraid to confront the greatest of our universal experiences. Her Blue Flame is about time, space, loss, love, memory, fear, and staying alive. In this exquisite collection, she explores what happens to us in this world in the ways that only poetry can capture.
“ Blue Flame is a book about consciousness, about what it means to re-see the world all around us in a world full of ultimate vision. Because when the book tells us, “You are exactly where you are / supposed to be,” we can believe it. Because these are poems that know everything and want to tell us so. Read this book and you will enter a heartbreaking world where beauty never ends, maybe thankfully. . . . In this book, she takes all of the very stuff of being alive and makes it a sound that seems like music but is better than music. Read this book and you will come alive again.”—Dorothea Lasky, author of Thunderbird
“ Blue Flame is a book about consciousness, about what it means to re-see the world all around us in a world full of ultimate vision. Because when the book tells us, “You are exactly where you are / supposed to be,” we can believe it. Because these are poems that know everything and want to tell us so. Read this book and you will enter a heartbreaking world where beauty never ends, maybe thankfully. . . . In this book, she takes all of the very stuff of being alive and makes it a sound that seems like music but is better than music. Read this book and you will come alive again.”—Dorothea Lasky, author of Thunderbird
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 2019
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 18, 2023
A brilliantly-disambiguated look at the way language, in the face of trauma, breaks (down / up), reverses, repeats, and disappears. In a cyclical series of poems, culminating in an experimental long-piece, Pettit gestures with finely-tuned, barely-controlled ferocity at the small logics that comprise staggering traumas. Who is predator, and who is prey? Who owns logic, and whose reason(s) must endure the continuous threat of injustification? Whose memory rests under the sign of accuracy, and whose is mixed-up, marginal, and dangerous?
Most infuriatingly and most interestingly, Pettit's critiques do not have a clear object, nor a clear context: this is not the purpose of Blue Flame. Its purpose may be better traced to a brief, telling citation of Borges toward the middle of the text. The purpose of Blue Flame is cartographic; it means to map the fallacies and falsehoods trapped under the hood of discourse, even as those very maps prove disorderly and even m(M)ad. We are left with a story whose blanks can't quite be filled, at an uncomfortable crossroads of play and pain.
Most infuriatingly and most interestingly, Pettit's critiques do not have a clear object, nor a clear context: this is not the purpose of Blue Flame. Its purpose may be better traced to a brief, telling citation of Borges toward the middle of the text. The purpose of Blue Flame is cartographic; it means to map the fallacies and falsehoods trapped under the hood of discourse, even as those very maps prove disorderly and even m(M)ad. We are left with a story whose blanks can't quite be filled, at an uncomfortable crossroads of play and pain.
August 25, 2019
Witty and beautiful writing about the mystery of being. Full of kindness and sadness and humor. Playful yet fierce. So many lines seemed to illustrate things I’ve always thought but never realized I thought them, like this one: “The snow almost looks like sound. / Sand. The sand almost sounds like sound. They present / spaces in our hearts we hadn’t heard before. They / were spaces in our hearts we hadn’t heard before.”
Other fav lines on first reading:
“You are funny / sitting over there with your different memories”
“Yet paleontologists keep changing / their minds just like everyone else.”
“Can we do something / I’m not afraid of?”
Other fav lines on first reading:
“You are funny / sitting over there with your different memories”
“Yet paleontologists keep changing / their minds just like everyone else.”
“Can we do something / I’m not afraid of?”
March 25, 2019
Emily Pettit's poems are a vivid investigation of the marvels and terrors in the natural world and the dark and friendly corners of the mind. Like Kandinsky and Miro, Pettit playfully abstracts a parade of thoughts, feelings, and facts, sometimes conversationally, and other times struggling at the door of the unsayable. "The barbarian is really a miniature librarian," a poem declares. Pettit's lines are unsettling billboards you wonder if you read correctly. They are reassurances whispered into your ear. Blue Flame reads like a kaleidoscope--the lines dream together, and every little turn shows you a new way.
July 19, 2019
"I was never a horse / with other people. I was only a horse / alone."
I love reading poetry so very unlike how I write. Pettit's new collection reads like a fever dream of epiphanies and anxious repetition. Quick and sharp sentences stacked on top of profound ramblings and insightful meanders to create a truly beautiful and delicate collection.
I love reading poetry so very unlike how I write. Pettit's new collection reads like a fever dream of epiphanies and anxious repetition. Quick and sharp sentences stacked on top of profound ramblings and insightful meanders to create a truly beautiful and delicate collection.
March 21, 2019
“I was waiting for it to rain hard
like this.
I was going to change hard
like this.”
like this.
I was going to change hard
like this.”
August 22, 2023
“I drew this bear so that you would love me / differently”
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews