Friendly Fire—that accidental agent of injury or death to one’s own forces—lends its name to Katrina Roberts’s third collection, capturing the disquieting mix of innocence and violence central to the work’s exploration. Elemental and protean, fire appears throughout these lyrical glimpses, always a syzygial force; that which terrifies (or destroys) may be that which is necessary. These poems consider how both nurture and nature inform violent behaviors; how we must choose to see beauty in decay; how prayer has power even if we don’t know whom we’re addressing. Informed by the possibilities of the “American” sonnet, this sequence confronts inherent dangers in even the best-intended human gestures, and explores how we sustain faith in the face of such damage. Searching for sense in an often shattered world, limning a seam between personal and political, mining contradictions we must live within when so many people are at war, when hunger, disease and poverty are rampant, these poems forge a place where intentions and consequences are called into question; where silence is indeed profound and must be honored with apology, forgiveness and praise; and where—when facing mortality—one might sing in celebration.

Katrina Roberts, a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a Paul Garrett Fellow and the Mina Schwabacher Associate Professor of English and the Humanities at Whitman College, where she directs the Visiting Writers Reading Series. Her first book of poems, How Late Desire Looks, won the Peregrine Smith Prize. The Quick, her second book, was chosen by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series (University of Washington Press), and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as Ploughshares; Northwest Review; New England Review; The Journal; New Orleans Review; Runes; Sonora Review; Best American Poetry; The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from the First 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize; The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets; Never Before: Poems About First Experiences; The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXII; The Long Journey: Pacific Northwest Poets; and Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction.

Friendly Fire, Katrina Roberts’ cycle of fifty-two sonnets, proves the durability and flexibility of the lyric today. A taut narrative scaffolding supports Roberts’ brief, searing meditations on family, farm labor, friendship, illness, parenting. Colloquial language lends verve. Literal images evoke the texture of farm life. Roberts explores abstraction (“Forgiveness”) with apt metaphor: “I shelter the grudge, build / a rustic cabin for it in my chest, pound rusty nails / in to anchor a porch where I sit glaring.” At the close of “Malignant,” the narrator asks a timeless question: “what lies in wait for us?” Read Friendly Fire for Roberts’ sensual and wise rendering of the here and now.

Katrina Roberts’ poems do not admit easy phrasings; instead, they are assembled word by word, each chosen with informed deliberation and a sense of pace. I have followed the track of her lines with heightened attention, eager for her next surprise.

This is a gorgeous, amazing book. I’ve been an admirer of Katrina Robert’s poems for years and these poems confirm my long-standing affection. Buy this book now.

Katrina Roberts’ Friendly Fire is a fresh, elegant, and serious poetic triumph. These poems, while introspective, speak of the world, and the reader develops a deep connection with the sensibility and mystery behind them. Katrina Roberts is the kind of poet who knows how to nurture the energies of pleasure and grief, ecstasy and despair, and bring them fully formed to the page. She explores the hidden places, discovers them and invents them. What she asks of birds might be asked of her poems: “. . . Where did the birds find this filament? Such / active circling and weaving; the dervish love calls / into being . . .” These poems are convincing and ample testimony to the truths of time and mortality, and Katrina Roberts is a poet of remarkable gifts.

Katrina Roberts’ new poems are wonderfully readable and engrossing, because they are so true to our conscious experience, making swift and credible transitions between perception, memory, reflection, worry, and well-being. Life is both sweet and anxious in these poems, which makes them the more real, and the pervading theme of fire has the ambiguity of Shakespeare’s “Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.”