Burn it down

the long version

In her debut full-length poetry collection, BURN IT DOWN, Katie Byrum sparks a poetic inferno out of a grim year. The book is a love letter to bad luck and an attempt to make peace with gravity, "sometimes kind/ in keeping us here/ other times letting us fall." These vivid and radiant poems look sorrow straight in the eye. Their speaker rages and laments, cracks jokes, flips the bird, and begs the walls to come down, only to learn the hard way: be careful what you wish for. With "a feeling of fashionable danger, " she drives at - and away from - the disasters that shape us, all the while keeping one eye on the rearview. This isn't catharsis; this is necessary arson. And yet, despite all the setbacks, BURN IT DOWN contends, we can look up and see "sky/ with a promise at the edges."