Additional information
by Joseph Lease (Author)
Joseph Lease' s Fire Season, composed in the heat of global and personal apocalypse, is one of the most intimate books I've ever encountered. " I'm writing inside death, I'm / in the room." Anyone who comes this close to death succumbs to its power to eradicate all pretense. Lease's language is simple, direct: " what is real / (maybe sunlight / (my mother's face." Words reappear like recurring dreams, brilliantly embodying Jack Spicer's dictum: " A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary." The prosody here is tightly structured yet raw, employing a subtle lyricism that at times turns insistent, tugging the reader's sleeve like an urgent child. Open parentheses permeate the text like stutters or ruptured membranes. They connect, shield, spill, but never ever close. Fire Season is achingly beautiful. Halfway through my first read I started crying. -- Dodie Bellamy
Author Biography
Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include The Body Ghost (Coffee House Press, 01/01/2018), Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011), and Broken World (Coffee House Press, 01/01/2007). Lease's poems " ' Broken World' (For James Assatly)" and " Send My Roots Rain" were anthologized in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Lease's poem " ' Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was anthologized in The Best American Poetry (Robert Creeley, Guest Editor). His poem " Free Again (Why don't people)" was published in The New York Times. Lease's poetry is also collected at PennSound, The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, KQED (NPR), The Scottish Poetry Library, The Poetry Project, Bay Poetics, The AGNI 35th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, Litscapes 01/01/2015, The Colorado Review, The Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, The Brooklyn Rail, Interim, and elsewhere. Lease has been asked to read at numerous colleges and universities. He has received The Academy of American Poets Prize and numerous grants and awards in poetry and poetics from Columbia University, Brown University, Harvard University, and California College of the Arts. Lease is a Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts.
