This Fire

Author: Justin Lacour

Publisher: Ursus Americanus Press (2023)

Like Ted Berrigan before him, Justin Lacour's collection, This Fire, interrogates the capacity of the sonnet. In these brief poems, we encounter the quotidian, the banal, the mysterious, the magnificent, and the dizzying surrealism of living all of life at once. Time is a construct stuffed into small envelopes of experience, predilection builds a diegetic soundtrack, and love is so large and looming it's catastrophic. Lacour's poems are painfully American if by that estimation we mean a restless paradox; the fire is also smoldered, the water is arid, the memory both ebullient and catatonic. "It is so American, fire," Larry Levis once wrote. "So like us. / Its desolation. And its brief, eventual triumph," which is not the epigraph to Lacour's collection, but certainly could have been.