Bonfire
Celia Gilbert
"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 'Lot's Wife' and other poems, Gilbert reinvents mythology, bringing it closer to the realities we recognize."
—Alicia Ostriker
about the author
Celia Gilbert is the author of several books of poetry, including An Ark of Sorts
(Alice James Books) and Queen of Darkness (Viking Press). Her
poetry has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New
Yorker, Southwest, and Grand Street. She is the
winner of a Discovery Award and a Pushcart Prize IX. The Poetry Society of America awarded
her both an Emily Dickinson Prize and a Consuelo Ford Award, and her work has been
frequently anthologized.
Celia Gilbert grew up in Washington D.C. She received a B.A. from Smith College and an M.A. from Boston University and was Poetry and Fiction Editor of The Boston Phoenix. After living abroad in England and France, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Author photo by Debi Milligan
