Ring of Fire

Reviews / Votes

The remarkable poems in Lisa Jarnot's Ring of Fire seem to come to us out of some profound, yet distant, sadness. Rising on wave after wave of near endless iteration, like a linguistic Mandelbrot set, they arrive in the long moment after loss as the signature and enactment of an initiation - the primal collision and redemptive force of breathing between the tensile structure of the poem and the frangible space of living. -- Patrick Pritchett * Jacket Magazine * Jarnot's poems get me both in the head and in the gut. The "I" is key to the poetry's power: it's ecstatic. From the Greek for 'to put out of place,' the ecstatic self is driven out of itself. This is the simultaneous joy and terror of the work: From 'Brooklyn Anchorage': 'I became someone else ... everything/ reached down from the sky to kill me / and now the cattails sing.' The Ring of Fire is both Dante's suffering and the Johnny Cash song's self burned away by passion. -- Alison Cobb * Small Press Traffic *