Firewatch

About the Author\nJan Verberkmoes is a poet and editor from Oregon. She received her MFA from the University of Mississippi, where she was a John and Renée Grisham Fellow. Her poems have recently appeared in the Paris Review, Lana Turner, and Denver Quarterly, among others. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a 2018-19 Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University, and a 2019-20 Fulbright Fellowship to Germany, she now lives in Colorado where she is pursuing her PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver.\nFIREWATCH lives in the porous recesses of recollection and the uncertainty felt when re-entering traumatic psychological and physical territories. White space as the natural silence of the page--the indefinable, yet present matter that pushes the text into place--permeates the collection as a kind of repression. Italicized fragments wind through the poems as an other-worldly tether that binds the speaker to the subconscious voices of its othered self. These elements grow together into a larger portrayal of the speakers' evolving relationship to the quiet violence of deterioration, to a threatening and threatened landscape, and to the fractures between perception and comprehension into which they slip.
Poetry.\nBook Description\nConcerned with the precarity of our modern world vis-a-vis environmental concerns, specifically climate change, Jan Verberkmoes' debut collection FIREWATCH poetically interrogates what might have been with what is.