Praise for FIREFALL

Firefall is a deftly crafted lyrical meditation on the relationship between environment, the body, and the ways in which each inhabits the other. In this collection, the landscape wears our bruises, fills with our ghosts, and invites us to look inward, compare the damage. Through this lens, each poem’s use of sound and repetition reminds the reader how abundant the world within and around us is, was, and could be if only we’d look at it with the right kind of attention. A quiet, necessary journey with a clear and urgent call: “do not underestimate the traces/ we have swiftly/ made of us.” Lang-Cassera’s writing is as powerful as it is captivating. 

—Samuel Piccone, author of Pupa (Anhinga Press, 2017), Editor’s Choice in the 2017 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize

Once in a great while, a book comes along that alters you in ways you cannot describe. You know only that something within you has shifted, the landscape that was is no longer, and you must begin again. Heather Lang-Cassera’s Firefall will bring you to this place—to a world “stark and untamed,” a place both ferocious and quiet where you will need to simultaneously reach down into the earth while bringing “the sky into the palms of [your] hands.” These poems will follow you into the garden you had only allowed yourself to hope for and onto the trail you thought you knew by memory. They will stand with you on the shore when the storm approaches. They will ignite a fire within you that inspires you to begin your own quiet revolution. This is “the call of the canyon wren [descending],” the place where the “anchored nail meets the moon,” your personal call to action. These poems are essential reading and will leave their mark in the best possible way.

—Letisia Cruz, author of Migrations & Other Exiles (Lost Horse Press, 2023), winner of the 2022 Idaho Prize for Poetry

About the Author

Heather Lang-Cassera is an author and ceramist. She was awarded a 2022 Nevada Arts Council Literary Arts Fellowship, served as the 2019-2021 Clark County, Nevada Poet Laureate, and was named 2017 Best Local Writer or Poet by the readers of Nevada Public Radio’s Desert Companion. Heather teaches creative writing with Nevada State University where she serves as a faculty advisor for 300 Days of Sun. She also serves as the Poetry Editor for Black Fox Literary Magazine, as an Editor with Tolsun Books, and as a Studio Assistant with Clay Arts Vegas where she teaches hand-building classes. Her previous collection, Gathering Broken Light (Unsolicited Press, 2021), was written with the support of a Nevada Arts Council Project Grant for Artists, was named a Distinguished Favorite by the Independent Press Awards, and won the NYC Big Book Award in Poetry, Social/Political. She is also the author of the micro-collection Where Hunger Must Be Feral (rinky dink press, 2023) and the chapbook I was the girl with the moon-shaped face (Zeitgeist Press, 2018).