Fire Passage

Winner of the 2025 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry selected by Pulitzer Prize recipient Diane Seuss, The Fire Passage is a lyric descent in the epic tradition, traveling unto realms unmoored by extreme weather and mysterious illness before resurfacing to the light of a world remade. Recording her experience of a health crisis amid continuous natural disaster, poet Lisa Wells recontextualizes biblically scaled plagues as the entropic catastrophes of our late-stage capitalist society. "e;I was sick, plainly. / I had my symptoms."e; Confronted with the disbelief and "e;skeptical pity"e; of medical professionals, Wells brilliantly illuminates the psychological exile of illness where patients, "e;turned out by the body,"e; find themselves on "e;malignancy's forced pilgrimage."e; The passage she travels is a gauntlet of flame, a path guarded by gatekeepers who acted "e;as if the wound were in [her] mind."e; ("e;And it was. But it was elsewhere, too."e;) This book serves as the answer to a query posed by bad-faith actors and the insightful dream-self alike: "e;so the wound is a window?"e; These pages convey grim comfort and radical optimism at once, reminding, "e;Friend, we die, but do not die alone."e; They insist on an affirmative practice of responding to rhetorical questions, building solidarity among the weary who call out, ensuring that they-that we-are not alone with silence. "e;It comes for all? // It comes for all."e; Despite its frank acknowledgment of fire's lethal nature, the fortifying poetics of this book never preclude the possibility of resurrection or lose their focus on rebuilding a better world from the ashes of this one. "e;Do not shrink from That Which / razed the scab, will / fertilize the disturbance,"e; Wells commands us. She entreats us to measure up to a corrective future. "e;Already its great wave breaks / against the mangroves. // Let us go / and greet it."e;