Alison Luterman

"Alison Luterman’s wonderful new collection, In The Time of Great Fires, engages deeply with the world, weaving past, present and future to consider our shared humanity. Sometimes with humor, always with heart, Luterman insists on compassion, a recognition of “the slender, fraying threads” we all dangle from. Particularly powerful are poems that illuminate the lives of girls and women: a grandmother who left Russia at fifteen, then “settled into her fate,” the gun control activist Emma Gonzalez, “not ashamed, not compliant. . . yelling truth into the microphone.” Though the book chronicles disasters—pandemic, climate change, gun violence, threats to democracy— beauty abounds: “nail polish. . . the exact iridescence of abalone and new pennies,” jasmine that gives off “the white-hot honey of distant stars.” In The Time of Great Fires achieves a wise and welcome balance, like “a candle that doesn’t conquer the dark but cracks it just a peep, at the seams." 

—Ellen Bass