Review of Fire Season by Joseph Lease
Joseph Lease has been writing about and feeling the world’s deep engagement with death and its emissaries for many years. His previous volumes of poetry, Broken World (2007), Testify (2011), and The Body Ghost (2018), have placed him in a lineage of writers (Buber, Dickinson, Jabès, Celan, Holderlin, Eliot, Spinoza, Auden, Baldwin, and Notley to name a few) who are compelled to pierce the veil of the everyday in order to more directly accost the beauty and the terror which makes humans as vulnerable, frustrating, and glorious as they can’t help but be. Lease’s newest collection is no different. Fire Season (Chax Press, 2023) is intimate in only the way that love-languages can be while maintaining the rigor of a thing observed, a thing learned from.
It happens that I read Lease’s fabulous book alongside Clara Bergman and Nick Montgomery’s aptly titled Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times. The pairing allowed for a case- study of sorts; an investigation into whether or not joy is still available, given the state of the world. If we take Bergman & Montgomery’s framing of joy, “For Spinoza, the whole point of life is to become capable of new things, with others. His name for this is joy”, not as happiness, but as something deeper, something necessary to the continued human project in general and necessary for each human specifically, then Lease tends a path through parental loss, through the existential struggle for personhood as a result of such loss, but also, through a more general human culpability for a planet neglected and left hollow.
The poems in Fire Season are sparse and intense, reminding the reader that the words of a poem are utterances often made under duress, reminding the reader that meaning is situational and contextual, reminding the reader that words matter. Lease’s poems in Fire Season create a relationship ex nihilo with the reader so that together this new coupling can become capable of new things, so that it can land on joy. The words on the page put themselves in peril FOR THE SAKE THE READER.
(soft wind like a road
(done (I wrote done
(I tried to write don’t
(don’t, don’t, don’t
“Riding Death”
Or later in the book, near the end of “Everything Merges With The Night”, “...( I/was exploding” blends notions of spectacle, manic energy, messianic impulse WHILE holding space for Whitman and his “multitudes”. Does one explode with the multitudes one contains when faced with the deterioration of both familial connections AND the overwhelm of a failing planet? This poem, this book, and this poet are willing to figuratively self-immolate in order to make the reader SEE. This is prophecy and healing. Fire Season is an essential book.
Lance Phillips was born on an Army base in Stuttgart, Germany (West Germany at the time of his birth) in 1970. He grew up in many places, including Las Vegas, NV, Del Rio, TX, New Castle, PA, and Charlotte, NC. He attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for his BA in English and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop for his MFA in poetry. He has taught poetry, creative writing, American literature, and cultural criticism in high school, community college, university, and continuing education programs. He has published four books of poetry, Corpus Socius, Cur aliquid vidi, These Indicium Tales, and Mimer with Ahsahta Press, and his fifth book of poetry, Devil-Fictions, is available from BlazeVox Books. In addition, he published a book of experimental autobiography, The Imposture Notebook, with BlazeVox Books in 2008. His work has appeared in many print and online journals, including New American Writing, Volt, Fence, Colorado Review, Slope, Verse, Denver Quarterly, Bennington Review, Bombay Gin, The Tiny, The Elephants, and Fourteen Hills. His work has been anthologized in The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing Anthology, Lenoir-Rhyne University’s tribute to Black Mountain College, Far From the Centers of Ambition anthology, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, and Fence Magazine’s A Best Of Fence: The First Nine Years. He lives with his wife in Huntersville, NC, and has two grown children.