Book Synopsis Bonfire is a passionate, controlled book by an extraordinary poet. First is evident the lucidity of intelligence; then the radiance; and finally the sheer power. --Josephine Jacobsen From deep places, these poems allow things to well up: memory, love, fear, and a sense of how our individual natures belong to the same great nature which keeps pushing life forward out of death... In Lots Wife and other poems, Gilbert reinvents mythology, bringing it closer to the realities we recognize. --Alicia Ostriker