“I lived in terror and I loved the world.” This is a primary tension in Lisa Wells’ sublime The Fire Passage, which tracks an odyssey, in language at once apocalyptic, rapturous, erotic, and absurd, from flood, to fire, to air. The Fire Passage is an epic, in structure and scale, in physical, and metaphysical ambition. Wells has lowered her bucket into the Gilgamesh well, has drawn up the waters of Dante, and revived the archetypes required to confront our deadly contemporary moment. Within the epic frame, Wells offers a remarkable lyric sensibility, with a miniaturist’s eye for the startling, precise, even delicate image. “Sores, in precise succession, throbbing along / a child’s spine like the buttoned closure of a dress,” she writes. And elsewhere, “A bayou at dusk, glitzy with fireflies / where rising tides arouse the wharves.” At times, she punctures the illusion of timelessness by dropping in a pop cultural reference—“Their keeper was a blowsy girl in Princess Leia buns”—or places us, with a moment of American vernacular: “In the unfortunate dive bar of daughters / descendent of daughters / you must dance with the one that brung you,” she writes, and names Laughlin, Nevada, the “asshole of the planet.” She does not strand us, however, in Laughlin, nor any of its iterations. This is a pilgrimage, primarily, of the Word. “That Which spoke the dream into my ear / spoke out of my body / spoke me out,” she writes, offering us the possibility of lyric rebirth. “This human way is abrupt as a brick shithouse / but down in that dismal pit the slag / fosters heaps of flowers.” In The Fire Passage, Lisa Wells has given us a masterful template for grief, survival, and transformation.

—Diane Seuss