Fire Season Poems

Occasioned by the birth of a first child and originally spoken aloud into a digital audio recorder on the poet¿s long commute between the art museum where he worked and his home in a neighborhood burned in the Witch Creek Fire of 2007, each of the poems in Patrick Coleman¿s first book resists the confusions of twenty-first-century parenthood, marriage, art, and commerce. By turns conversational and anxious, metaphysical and self-mocking, celebratory yet permeated by an awareness of life¿s flickering ephemerality, Fire Season is a search for gratitude among reasons to be afraid¿and proof that a person can pass through the fires and come out the other side alive.