Fire Index measures the interior life of a survivor against the world she creates through her own fractured marriage, motherhood, and religion. Told in fragments, using hybrid and persona, Breitland confronts the trauma of her brother’s death, her father’s abuse, and the complicated relationships to her sister, mother, and womanhood. She reckons with her complicit, and often dishonest life, and how walking out from the burning construct demands her full attention, forgiveness, responsibility.
Written in experimental verse and hybrid, Fire Index attempts to illustrate the traumatized mind.
2022 Sundog
Poetry Book Award Winner
Advance Praise for Fire Index by Bethany Breitland
“Fire Index is an exploration beneath the many layers of truth, time, memory and so many other factors that is the stuff that sometimes makes life too hot to sit with.”
—Shanta Lee, final judge, author of GHETTOCLAUSTROPHBIA
“Bethany Breitland has penned one of the most surprisingly brutal and yet beautiful books of poems I have read in decades. Page by page a near gothic narrative in a variety of forms unfolds — lined, fragmented, prose poems, definitions — she takes cruel acts and juxtaposes them with an imagination so profound and metaphorical as to make me rethink the possibility of language. This is a rural landscape rife with religion and not really concerned with redemption or that wells or walls itself in self-pity. Far from it. As the title indicates, this is a book of the things that burn us, about family that harms, till eventually one writes ‘maybe suffering doesn’t matter as much as it once did.’ Only these poems suggest maybe the scars that heal don’t matter as much as the ones that don’t, and this book is a map through all of them.”
—Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Day Every Day Is
“Fiercely rooted by love and brutal devotion, I was completely stunned and devastated by Bethany Breitland’s debut collection, Fire Index. This collection lives somewhere between the real and the imaginary, the only place where a vulnerable young woman could exist as she details the work of intimacy, trauma, and the complex emotional landscape of family wounds. Rendered with deep beauty as it lives alongside despair, I was knocked over by Breitland’s lyric exploration that ultimately leads toward liberation, a figure smouldering but free. Fire Index reveals a truly brilliant mind and heart at work.”
—Tina Chang, Poet Laureate of Brooklyn, author of Hybrida
Media
An Interview with Rebekah Dalmer and the poet.
“Bethany Breitland is breaking the rules of poetry and emerging with a fiery collection of poems. To help a promising Vermont poet publish their first or second book, the annual Sundog Poetry Book Award partners with Green Writers Press to publish their new manuscript. Breitland’s book, “Fire Index,” was chosen for the 2022 award. . . ”
“. . .The motif of fire acts as a throughline in Breitland’s work, stringing the poems together to form a collective whole. That recurring theme was inspired in part by a fire in Breitland’s home a few years ago but also serves to reflect the burning of past events and their transformation through the healing process into an entirely new entity. . . .” (link)
—Alicia Wolfram, The Charlotte News
“Accounts of the radical remaking of self are foundational to the American tradition—from Puritan conversion accounts to the narratives of escaped slaves, and onward. Bethany Breitland’s Fire Index, winner of the 2022 Sundog Poetry Book Award (Green Writers Press, 2023) can be read as a contemporary installment in this tradition, made fresh and potent through Breitland’s deep insight and innovative craft. The book charts the speaker’s growth from a terrifying evangelical girlhood in rural Indiana to a post-divorce re-envisioning of identity, love, and family in Vermont. . . . Whether or not the reader personally identifies with the deeply American story Breitland recounts, it is hard to resist her bracing feminist voice, and her vision of what is involved in the outer and inner work of change. I was left thinking about what growing up might yet require in my own life, different as it is. Likewise, it is impossible to finish this book unimpressed by the craft and intensity with which Breitland interweaves poems diverse in material and shape into a gorgeously unified whole.” (link)
—Anne Myles, North American Review
About the Author
Bethany Breitland was born in northern Indiana. Her people are cult members, truckers, doctors, child-mothers, and business tycoons. She has lived, studied, and taught on the West Coast, the South, and New England. Breitland earned her undergrad degree from Pepperdine University and her MFA from Vermont College of the Fine Arts. As an educator and activist, she has worked for over 20 years concerning women’s rights and the LGBTQ community. Recipient of various poetry prizes including semi-finalist for the OSU Press/The Journal Wheeler Prize for Poetry, this is her first full-length book of poems. She lives with her children and her partner Michael outside of Burlington, Vermont.
SPECS
Fire Index
Poetry
Price: $15.95
Page Count: 90 pages
Format: Softcover
Trim Size: 6 x 8
ISBN: 979-8-9870707-9-6
Publication Date: April 4, 2023
Distributor: IPG / Chicago
Rights sold: All rights available.
Rights & Publicity contact: Dede Cummings
dede@greenwriterspress.com
Distributor: IPG; also available through Ingram, Follett/Baker & Taylor, and other wholesalers.
Individuals can pre-order directly from Bookshop.org or contact your local, independent bookstore.
The following Vermont bookstores can offer signed copies:
Phoenix Books (link)
The Flying Pig Bookstore (link)
Booksellers, libraries, colleges/universities, gift shops, etc., can order directly through IPG:
Independent Publishers Group
814 N. Franklin Street
Chicago, IL 60610
Order Placement: (800) 888-4741
Via email: orders@ipgbook.com
For a review copy—digital or print—email dede@greenwriterspress.com