Death Fluorescence is a triumphant and visually stunning collection. Poet Julia Bouwsma expertly crafts an exploration of life on this Earth woven with the wonders of parasitic worms, Jewish identity, the persistent neurosis of mice. Grounded in visualizations of nature bordering on the spiritual, with moons that hemorrhage, ghost apples, and a quarry's snow-mounded shoulder, one can dig their fingers into the soil of this collection and watch the speaker grow throughout. Each page is "an entire universe of starry luminescent decay"-from the contrapuntal to the Markov Sonnet, these poems are anything but typical. The poet's poignant language demands to be heard and asks the reader to "bite down among stippled wormholes and taste our blinding sweetness." Bouwsma herself puts it best: this collection "will lift into the sky like a cathedral toward heaven"-it is transcendent, it is revolutionizing, it is fluorescent.
Language
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 203 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight
ISBN-13
978-1-951979-83-6 (9781951979836)
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Schweitzer Classification
Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine where she is a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, and small-town librarian, as well as Maine's sixth Poet Laureate, serving a term from 2021 to 2026. Bouwsma is the author of three poetry collections: Death Fluorescence (Sundress Publications, 2025), Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018), and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). She is also the librettist for the short chamber opera, Ghost Apples, created in collaboration with composer Nathan Davis and the Halcyon Quartet. A recipient of a 2024 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and two Maine Literary Awards, Bouwsma serves as Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, Maine.
