What Fire

by Alice Miller

What Fire is about how to continue as catastrophe crawls in, when the climate crisis has its grip on everyone, the internet has been shut down, and the buildings are burning up. What happens when the philosophers never arrive? What songs are still worth singing? In her third collection, Alice Miller takes a fierce, unflinching look at the world we live in, at what we have made, and whether it is possible to change.

Genres: Poetry

60 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2021

About the author

Alice Miller is the author of the novel, More Miracle than Bird and the poetry collections, Nowhere Nearer and The Limits. She grew up in Wellington, New Zealand, and currently lives in Berlin, Germany.

Alice is a graduate of the International Institute of Modern Letters and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow.

Reviews

[Simon Sweetman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actually blown away by these poems. A small handful of them instantly feel like some of the very best I've ever read. And as a collection, a suite, a movement, this is divine.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The names we call one another / are fissures, gaps.” Alice Miller’s new collection, What Fire, takes place in and around these gaps, in the chasm between our terrible dying world and all the love and beauty that somehow thrives within it. Between nature and climate, human and animal, Miller situates herself, her poetic voice, and the looming catastrophe, asking of herself and her reader, “How do you accept the Hell / you make?” Miller is painfully aware of the futility of the poem, at odds with the necessity of leaping into it anyway: “Grief’s all alone — / but also overlapping. When will we know / that the poem can’t save us, / or when will we wake up and see how it can?” Perhaps this is a metaphor for living in a time of crisis, continuing to face life even as we doubt its longevity; these are ideas explored so deftly in ‘‘Apocalypse Next’ and ‘After The Internet’. “I’ve never been good at the future”, she says in the stellar title poem — “it’s just an episode in a series we no longer have writers for.” Musically alive and animated in its images, a single poem singing with “rain’s pinpricks and scraping gales” and “a judder of bulldozers, wherein “the light’s blunt, / the undercurrent’s open to song, slung deep”, Miller is a poet of concept as much as rhythm and sound, who is unafraid to stand in the naked light of artistic insufficiency, and ask her questions, and leave behind her declarations of love + goodness.

[Malachy Moran · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful little book that takes an unflinching look at the world as we have built it. Its not always pretty, but dammit its true. Picked this up completely at random from a small local bookstore and did not regret it.

[Kevin Doran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Except for a couple, most poems didn’t resonate with me.