Firefall

Heather Lang-Cassera is an author and ceramist. She was awarded a 2022 Nevada Arts Council Literary Arts Fellowship, served as the 2019-2021 Clark County, Nevada Poet Laureate, and was named 2017 Best Local Writer or Poet by the readers of Nevada Public Radio's Desert Companion. Heather teaches creative writing with Nevada State University where she serves as a faculty advisor for 300 Days of Sun. She also serves as the Poetry Editor for Black Fox Literary Magazine, as an Editor with Tolsun Books, and as a Studio Assistant with Clay Arts Vegas where she teaches hand-building classes. Her previous collection, Gathering Broken Light (Unsolicited Press, 2021), was written with the support of a Nevada Arts Council Project Grant for Artists, was named a Distinguished Favorite by the Independent Press Awards, and won the NYC Big Book Award in Poetry, Social/Political. She is also the author of the micro-collection Where Hunger Must Be Feral (rinky dink press, 2023) and the chapbook I was the girl with the moon-shaped face (Zeitgeist Press, 2018).

Firefall, by Heather Lang-Cassera, whispers to us the urgency of climate change. In hushed tones, lyrical free verse and cyclical pantoums evoke the diminishing and intensifying seasons. We might look for comfort in the occasional rhyming couplets, in the evocative syntax, in the breathtaking imagery that portrays the beauty of this world, yet these ecopoems require us to parse out seeming dualities: fire and flood, repetition and redundancy, vulnerable witness and autonomous self. Exploring the complexity of language in advocacy and activism, both the tangible effects and the dangers of mere performance, Firefall quietly begs us to consider the wisdom of our own hands as "a birth cry, a death breathing, an intangible / sun, a heap of inconsolable hope / available only from yesterdays" as well as the ways in which each "voice is a comet / electric."