Wildfire Season by Arthur Sze
Wildfire Season by Arthur Sze
by Arthur Sze
A limited edition letterpress printed broadside of Arthur Sze’s poem, Wildfire Season.
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Limited edition of 52 broadsides, 40 of which are for sale.
Each broadside is SIGNED by Arthur Sze.
Hand-set in the Bembo family of metal types (cast by Michael & Winifred Bixler), with vintage wood type titling in the Bradley typeface.
Text is letterpress printed in black ink, with titling and author name in transparent ink, on dampened St Armand handmade paper.
Size: 14” x 9” (with slight natural deckle on bottom edge).
$30 each.
From the Western US to New England, the UK to Australia, climate-change driven wildfires have erupted to devastating effect for humans and wildlife. In his poem Wildfire Season, Arthur Sze uses this searing reality as a portal to enter, imagine, and investigate life on the future's edge.
Mountain-eating flames and blossoming pear trees bend in the wind. A song rises from the throat and the drumming hands of an indigenous singer. A scorpion or an ant carry healing or poison. Heart-stopping fragility exists simultaneously with immense (constructive? destructive?) capacity in Sze’s vision, which telescopes from micro to macro, from cellular to cosmic.
A reader traversing this poem line by line might begin to wonder…what will lineate us, shape our own existence against the blank future? Songlines, or detonations? And what are the limits of resonance — how far can we stray (from one another, from this Earth) before we can no longer hear each other sing? Time itself becomes the flashpoint, by which light we see — or don’t see — what is unfolding right in front of us, right now.
Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021), selected for a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize; Sight Lines (2019), for which he received the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), selected for an American Book Award. He has also published The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024) and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). Another collection, The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems, is forthcoming from the Museum of New Mexico Press in spring 2025.
A recipient of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement, 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and a Howard Foundation Fellowship, as well as five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2023–2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
(From Copper Canyon Press)
Arthur Sze photo by Sharlett Bravo
