Description: The final volume in the poet's extraordinary tetralogy on earth, air, water, and fire
Review Quotes:
"Brenda Hillman's latest poems blaze up like matches--they dance and flicker out by the bottom of the page ... Hillman's book reminds us that one of the functions of art is to disturb: to startle us out of the ossified, inflexible forms of the routine and conventional. In this, Hillman has a particularly American genius."--Dana Levin, Boston Review
"I can think of no better recent poetry than Brenda Hillman's in its reach and ambition and serious play that widens poetic horizons [H]er latest book--visionary, political, and ecological--encompasses a dizzying number of layers as it warms, shines, threatens, and burns."--Michael Morse, Tikkun
"Hillman has created a book both masterful and sprawling, straightforward at times and experimental at others [It] warrants close attention, for being urgent political poetry and so much more."--Janna Knittel, Pleiades
"Hillman's devotion to social justice--her unwavering belief in poetry's capacity to address root causes of our political strife--ultimately purifies our fallen world in the languages of elemental fire."--Karen An-Hwei Lee, The Iowa Review
"Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire celebrates poetry as a mode of sheer delight in the kinds of being that are committed to finding pleasure and freedom and connection as elementary conditions of being in the world."--Charles Altieri, Open Humanities Press
"I love this book so I want to explore the grounds of my pleasures."--Charles Altieri, Open Humanities Press
"Brenda Hillman is like her poems--surreptitiously wild, wordy and replete with surprising confessions."--Lou Fancher, Contra Costa Times
"In Seasonal Works, perhaps the friction between the ephemeral and the eternal are the two timbers that give way to spark."--Erin Lyndal Martin, Rain Taxi online reviews
"Brenda Hillman possesses what many contemporary poets do not: both a political imagination and a poetic conscience. She does what Rosanna Warren says poets should do more often: she 'wrestles with the polis' Hillman's mystical imagination, her exacting intelligence, and her sensuous play with words on the page often leads to a Mallarmé-like magic. These poems are about vision; like the sinewy forms in Blake's cosmology, the elasticity of her poems require space, image, sound--well, it's a whole new universe. Bravely, Hillman will take you there."--Amy Pence, Colorado Review
"Brenda Hillman's latest poems blaze up like matches--they dance and flicker out by the bottom of the page Hillman's book reminds us that one of the functions of art is to disturb: to startle us out of the ossified, inflexible forms of the routine and conventional. In this, Hillman has a particularly American genius."--Dana Levin, Boston Review
"[A]n activist poetics that holds at its heart the obligation to renew the language and the world."--Jerry Harp, Kenyon Review