Before Fire: Divorce Poems

Poetry. Allie Marini Batts’ Before Fire: Divorce Poems is a steel-girded elegy that instructs, ‘I have taught you well / how to leave me.’ Batts’ speaker masterfully mourns and acts; she is the voice of the put upon wife but also the wanderer who knows her secret freedoms. In these embodied words, littered with domestic menageries such as ‘wings fluttering like sheaves of unpaid bills, ’ it is explicit that divorce has given more than it has taken. Separation brings about Batts’ stunning linguistic transparency in stanzas like, ‘The house smells of smoke / and spilled drinks, your loud stories / and my lonely heart.’ BEFORE FIRE is an exquisite dissection of femininity and feminism, a blue flame that simultaneously combusts and illuminates our definition of ‘wife.’ –Sandra Marchetti, author of Confluence and The Canopy