To Love a Fierceness so Bright is available now for preorder!
Chelsea Fanning’s debut poetry book, To Love a Fierceness so Bright, is a fiercely nuanced portrait of womanhood. Full of witchcraft, grit, ferocity, and tenderness, Fanning dissects with piercing precision the power names hold — both those that we take up willingly, and those thrust upon us.
Equal parts unsettling and edifying, this fevered collection invites us to reclaim the narratives that seek to constrain us and to “re-form them from all our bones.”
Praise for “To Love a Fieriness so Bright”
Disturbing and illuminating, cross-stitched by myth, Chelsea Fanning's poems may haunt your dreams. There is not a millimeter to spare between this poet's mind and her blood-saturated, muscle-quick body "like a fresh crucifixion." "I am not/who they said I'd be," she explains. She is witch and crone, she knows well the woe that is in marriage by "the turning to talk to you and my voice smacking against silence." Yet hope ripples through: "We want to adorn ourselves with stars," and her wish has given her book its title: it is "to celebrate my body, to love a fierceness so bright/ it scorches every curse I've dealt it."
—Alicia Ostriker, Waiting for the Light & The Volcano and After
Eyes fastened onto fiery Eros, Fanning peels away layer on fleshy layer of misogyny, earth-ruin, and the human and the creaturely bodies she adores, and sings her devotion and retribution. These gleaming lyrics call forth Judy Grahn, Ai, Matthea Harvey, and all spirits who gaze and dream. Fanning knows her guides: virgins and crones, hags, cunts, and whores, all of whom evoke indelible worlds. Of course there are spells among the ferns and twigs, the goddess teakettle, and the eels and gills of sea and land-locked women. There are “men” who collect and control things and “women” who release them. Profanities are reliable, like menstrual blood on thighs in a “fresh crucifix.”
In poem after poem, frequently constructing the quatrain like a burning brick, Fanning’s voice crackles with sound-collisions and blunt stresses. These she balances with earned personal wisdom, not only charting losses, though they are abundant, but remarking on them as one might gaze at fresh wounds still busy trying to mend up at the corpuscle level. This debut is ravishing and elemental.
—Judith Vollmer, THE SOUND BOAT: New and Selected Poems
Fanning’s To Love a Fierceness So Bright teems with female characters—witches and monsters—who gain freedom by embracing their monstrosity. In one poem, a crone sews her hunger into “a black epaulet to wear on her shoulder”. In another, Adam comically mansplains the “tidy leaf and petal home” of Eden to Eve. The wonderful defiance of this work is rooted in redefining words and roles as well as re-imagining: “I want sculptors tearing out hair, desperate / to perfect the crooked bow of my back”.
—Matthea Harvey, If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?