Seneca ReviewReviews
Reviews
On Joseph Lease’s Fire Season
Chax Press | 2023
reviewed by Sheila E. Murphy
I have lived with Fire Season throughout its gestation, observing the patience, confidence, and integrity with which Joseph Lease has shepherded this book into being. While virtually all poets edit their work, Lease is profoundly committed to exactness as he sculpts each poem. I have witnessed his frequent and continual shifting of which words and passages belong, of their placement on the page, while honoring newly emerging language, as Lease navigates ongoing revision with faithful care.
In parallel with Lease’s composition process, rereading Fire Season reveals a poet whose fundamental practice is always questioning, remaking, and listening, thereby offering a prescient depiction of an increasingly distorted and painful world marked by both the global devastations of our climate crisis and the personal loss of his parents. Lease maintains a tough and tender accuracy throughout all he depicts. Disturbing events— such as the California fires of 2025, escalating political horrors, and predatory divisiveness worldwide—have increased exponentially since the publication of Fire Season. The elegiac essence of the book is both personal and urgently systemic, calling out a greed-racked culture that violates our planet’s sacredness and our very spirit—both communally and individually. This volume’s power draws us with urgency to commit to healing our individual psyche and our shared ecology to make building inclusive and sustainable community possible.
In Fire Season, love coexists with rampant destruction of the earth and social systems. “Kisses / that we share across the sky” remain more real than the horror, even as it eclipses those fragile moments and features of experience (17). Lines such as “(he said violet, blue / wind / pushes river light, birches” sing to the reader the chastening power of love and nature, despite the terror of the projected end (21).
Early in the book, Lease depicts a compelling portrait of a “tough,” father who embodies strength while demonstrating an enduring love, sensing on his deathbed the presence of his own mother as he squeezes his son’s hand. The son embraces the father’s reality in that moment, telling the father that his mother loves him:
(he hates “sentimental slop” (hold
his hand, he’s from Coney Island,
he’s tougher
than you
(he says, when I squeeze your hand
(I’m squeezing her hand
(his mother in the room (his
mother’s me (tell him (tell
him (your mother
loves you (riding death (23-24)
The vehicle of the ever-open left parentheses effectively leads the reader to each next perception, one characterized by an apt openness and a refusal of closure. Each breath moves to each new piece of language evocative of a longer history. Lease honors the mother’s abiding presence while acknowledging the reality that she is gone, that she metaphorizes our planet in danger, and that, on both levels, the inner child is left with loss.
In “Falling,” a parallel expression of the poet’s grief for his own dead mother (the wonderful poet Miriam Lease, to whom this book is dedicated) resonates with a sense of the loss of God and a once-sacred recognition of ecology.
(we touch the gone voice
bent in half (and mom is
green and she is dead
and she is
where oh where
(she was
the search
for God
(for love
(the summer
wind
(the starry
night (53-55)
The poem brings together multiple dimensions of the mother who was everything to the speaker: “(the search / for God / for love” (54). Throughout Fire season, the poems acknowledge that each of us belongs to a shared universe, beginning with the early love of parents who form for us, in us, a world always threaded with ubiquitous death—the constant and certain unknown.
In the father’s voice, we hear impressions of the earth, the horror of violations against it: “our lifestyle is wrecking the / planet for Christ’s sake” (26). We learn of the father as a man who lives in love and who is no fool, calling out angrily the wrecking of the universe at the hand of narrow, self-interested perspectives that neglect a larger, connected human reality. It is important to point out that the poems in Fire Season do not presume an unduly simplistic view of the world. We sense from the book that the harsh natural world, replete with survival needs among many living beings, remains the context for human actions. The very brutality we see in humans is not unique to our species, yet as humans we can hope to discern paths that might lead to a larger, purposeful, mutually beneficial, interconnected ecosystem.
The poems further depict the grieving speaker’s anxieties and sense of guilt for what “we” are doing to the very planet that sustains our life: “(we / killed the / animals” (48). The parent in this poem authors hope in the child, who chimes the powerful need to craft and relate “your story,” acknowledging, “(I have to “make it up” (43). The “cream light / cream thick / purple / clouds” represent a surface reality of the “fire clouds” that signify devastation and extinction (43 and 48, respectively). The poet’s moral compass, imparted by his parents, make it imperative for him to speak truth against the continual assaults on us and our planet. The text suggests that moral strength can cause dividing lines to evaporate in the face of its power.
The poem “In a Field” functions as a pivot in the book. This poem’s tender, lyrical passages express a desire to merge with nature while lamenting its destruction: “I wore / the rain that rose and fell like light (I / wore the snow that piled up by the / gate / I wrote the secret number on my hand / I write the secret number / in my eye . . .” (37) Here, the speaker takes hold of nature by way of writing. The active voice heightens the sense of engagement, a prayer in honor of what is possible, culminating in “(I dreamed the dream that dropped me in the sun” (37).
The poem “Now What” more explicitly transitions to the shattering of the world: “(the / world flew away (like / light” (63). The dream of what should have been possible is splintered and on the threshold of being destroyed. A short series of passages reveres the unification of snow falling across the land. Earth broken into pieces lifts off, and the sacramental reality of that brokenness is shared by every living thing. The solitude of the person left behind is very much one with nature, reporting that:
(and the world fell (I walked in the
trees (in the shadows of the trees (the
world flew (the world flew away (like light (63)
What does this book bring to the reader?
First, the notion that an early foundation of honesty and love in a child’s life can frame trust, care, and respect. The child in this book sees a “tough” father who is equally tender, loving, and aware of his own mother as the central reality, allowing the imagination to act as healer amid horror. That foundation of abiding love can prepare the adult to confront attacks on beauty and sacredness.
Second, Fire Season paints a no-holds-barred picture of a world made increasingly treacherous by “corpse light,” asking “will we / kill the world?” (76-77). The book expresses grief for deceased parents and an increasingly impacted planet, witnessing the horrors of climate change while trying to frame and formulate how to think, how to feel, how to contribute something more conscience-driven and real. The painful truth of an apocalyptic reality raises constant questions for the reader of this important work.
There is no guarantee that we will be equipped to take on the monstrous enemies of life as we know it should be.
And even as the book exemplifies a powerful elegy for a world in pain, it reaffirms a truth that Joyce made plain in “The Dead”: the departed never leave us. Honoring loved ones means never letting go of the impressions gifted us by touch, by signal, by word. Those who have left us can be, at times, far more vivid than those who remain. This book testifies that love is an integral force for learning who we are and for taking up what we want to do and what we must do.
Throughout the book, fire represents not only natural destruction but also the greed behind it, propelled beyond what the mind can easily conceive, threatening even the soul. And what is the soul, Lease asks repeatedly? Perhaps it is what evinces a future desired yet also impossible amid rage.
The concluding words cry out both fact and feeling:
(the animals
are dead, are dying (mom,
you read the books to me, and
I tried
(my legs are trembling, my hands are
trembling (believe me, don’t believe
me, I don’t care (I was the future, says
the nothing man (I was the future for
a day or two (93-94)
Such a reality derives from the nearly invisible but ubiquitous architects of greed even as we harken back to the mother’s gentle reading of books that brought about a hope for a future—not too much to ask, yet dramatically different from the imagined future.
Throughout Fire Season, the speaker urgently seeks to respond and act in conscience with full awareness of the climate crisis. Reading Lease’s powerful book convinces this reader of the strength of poetry. The exploration is necessary work, deep work, work contagious with urgency. How then does the power of enduring love fare against the titular Fire Season? Ultimately, poetry attests to the fact that the imagination is an enduring act against a paralyzing future. Speaking truth vividly and honestly is perhaps the sole way of facing the fire.
Published 06/02/2025
Bio:
Sheila E. Murphy has had poems appear in Verse Daily, Poetry, Hanging Loose, Fortnightly Review. Forthcoming books in 2025-2026: Escritoire (Lavender Ink), October Sequence 52-122 (Chax Press), and a collection from Unlikely Books. Most recent book: Permission to Relax (BlazeVOX Books, 2023). Received the Gertrude Stein Poetry Award for Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Hay(ha)ku Book Prize for Reporting Live From You Know Where (Meritage Press, 2018). Her Wikipedia page can be here.