Fire Season

Poetry. California Interest. Winner of the Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry. Occasioned by the birth of a first child and originally spoken aloud into a digital audio recorder on the poet’s long commute between the art museum where he worked and his home in a neighborhood burned in the Witch Creek Fire of 2007, each of the poems in Patrick Coleman’s first book resists the confusions of twenty-first-century parenthood, marriage, art, and commerce. By turns conversational and anxious, metaphysical and self-mocking, celebratory yet permeated by an awareness of life’s flickering ephemerality, FIRE SEASON is a search for gratitude among reasons to be afraid–and proof that a person can pass through the fires and come out the other side alive.