American Fires

American Fires is a great powerful book. Nothing since Thomas McGrath's Letter to an Imaginary Friend can touch it for its global vision, its empathetic humanity, and the wise fury of its sustained cry for justice. -- William Tremblay The private and the public blend fearlessly in Floyce Alexander's Memory of the Future... In his elegiac, darkly sensuous textures, Alexander sometimes recalls Kenneth Rexroth. His lines have a seriousness and a weight missing from much current poetry. The ominous 'Cuban Missile Crisis' is one of the strongest American poems I've seen connecting politics and the working life. -- Thomas R. Smith, Minneapolis Star Tribune I love the physicality of the poems [in Bottom Falling Out of the Dream]. And also there is much of 'the seer' voice [in] 'A Artoud' where you hit some nerves in the future we are already beginning to live. You are able to write about so many things that the feeling I come away with is one of great versatility and abundance. No, I hate the word versatility ... what I mean is more invested than that, a pervasive concern for what people and nations are doing with their lives. -- Tess Gallagher, from a letter to the author

In a poetry at once political, erotic, and powerfully lyrical, Floyce Alexander writes, as he told Rolling Stone, of "a generation of orphans . . . our legacy an American dream become more than a nightmare, a death to be lived through, with whatever utopia that may be possible our only common integer of survival."