With a Gift for Burning

Apol, L. (2018). With a gift for burning. Georgetown, KY:  Finishing Line Press

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The gifts in Laura Apol’s With a Gift for Burning are the very poems themselves, hard won and precise, uttered in solitude against the ash of familial disintegration. It’s her “inheritance,” as she says in one poem. Yet, in every line, Apol expresses the desire to connect—hence, the burning in the title: love offered unconditionally again and again, nature providing the only solace. “Shards of shell, fish bones / picked clean,” yes, but also salmon returning, cattails exploding “in a thousand furred tongues.”

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—Dennis Hinrichsen, 2017-2019 Poet Laureate of Lansing, Michigan, most recently author of Skin Music 

To read these poems is to row your boat into the straits of motherhood. You are always alone and never alone in that fragile and tensile craft. Something is burning, smoldering, flaming up into language and the hope of reciprocity. Reader, take heart, row until you get to yes.

—Jane Taylor, most recently author of Pencil Light