“It’s important to realize that this is a book that rushes from clinical madness to a liberation discovered in religious union. The runaway is a real human who experiences the fire of the divine that hurts and saves. Maybe only once in a lifetime and only spoken in poetry like this.”
Firebird
by Kythe Heller
Kythe Heller’s Firebird sequence probes the capacity of the human spirit to endure under extreme conditions. Here, fire is both a destructive and a unifying force, altering people and landscapes. Runaways, the sick and the poor, a forest and a smoldering mattress — these stunning images burn themselves into the reader’s imagination. The female body becomes the site of trauma and myth, a place where “everything is burning, has been and is always burning.” Fiercely intelligent and relentlessly visceral, Firebird renders the world with singular clarity: “there were so many things that would look—nice—if they were seen through flames.”
Kythe Heller
Kythe Heller is a poet, essayist, interdisciplinary artist, and scholar completing a doctorate at Harvard University in Comparative Religion and Arts and Media Practice. She is also a practitioner of Sufism and a student of M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. Her published work includes two poetry chapbooks, Immolation (Monk Honey) and Thunder (WICK: Harvard Divinity School), the philosophical monograph “An Ethnography of Spirituality” (Cambridge UP), the essay "Living Backwards" in the anthology Quo Anima: spirituality and innovation in contemporary women’s poetry (Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics), and poems and essays published in The American Poetry Review, Tricycle, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from Harvard University, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, The Mellon Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Squaw Valley Community of Writers. While completing an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, she created a literacy and creative arts program at the Coachman Family Homeless Shelter in White Plains, New York; she has also taught through the Bard Prison Initiative, Bradley-Angle Women’s Shelter, Yellow Brick Road Street Outreach, and lived and worked full-time at Janus Youth Shelters; currently she is a teaching fellow at Harvard University and on the faculty of the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College. In 2017, she founded VISION LAB, a collective of creatives working across spirituality, the arts, social and environmental justice, and technology.
