Poem Fire

Spanning more than thirty years of work, Frank X. Gaspar’s Poem Fire: New and Selected maps an American landscape suspended between the luminous and the familiar.

In a voice both bold and vulnerably intimate, these poems meditate on longing through an attention to the world’s smallest gestures—an attention that is not mere sentimentality but an act of resistance against erasure and disappearance. Gaspar turns with equal care to overlooked lives: waitresses, truck drivers, travelers—figures encountered at the edges of intimacy, briefly illuminated in the midst of their routines. As Gaspar writes, “Lights winking among the shuffling cornstalks. And my lantern hissing. My loneliness was my own doing, but I didn’t know.” 

“Frank Gaspar's poems are agile and forceful, their narratives clear and absorbing" (Mary Oliver), and are carried by a speaker unconfined by time yet anchored in the sublimity of the everyday. Including work from five previous collections, Poem Fire captures the quiet radiance of lived experience; this collection celebrates the life of a poet with a warm, keen eye.