Book Review

Nicholas Yingling’s debut, The Fire Road, is a place-based poetry collection focusing on Western wildfires and their myriad effects on California’s landscape and human psyche. Many poems describe survival and coming to terms with ecological ruin and human consumption; the metaphor of fire extends from ecological and economic consumption into the human body. Specifically, a prominent series of poems explore a loved one’s challenges with anorexia. In these pieces, fire stands in for metabolism and the body shows wear, like the charred forests, burning from the inside.

“Fire roads” are typically rural thoroughfares specifically in place to help firefighters manage wildfires. More succinctly, as the collection opens, “The road that breaks fire / we named fire.” Repetition and spareness are hallmarks of Yingling’s style and evoke the spareness that results in the aftermath of fire. Like the titular fire roads, these poems inhabit aftermaths and offer thoroughfares from and towards ruins, lingering on precipices of what was destroyed and what remains.

The third poem in the collection, “Weather in California,” is a three-part poem divided into one-page segments that reflects on the 2017 Tubbs Fire. In this piece, the speaker reflects on the damages of the Tubbs Fire, which at the time was the most damaging wildfire in California. Typical of Yingling, the reader is often invited in with moments of the mundane, beginning with small talk: “On the phone we talk strictly weather.” At the same time, “weather” in our era often seems to contain more gravitas than it once did in conversations; anomalies are no longer just anomalies, instead implying climate catastrophe. Yingling evokes that hovering catastrophe in the everyday effectively throughout The Fire Road. Fire, for Yingling, is both destructive and cleansing; he writes with awe and clarity on both aspects, describing “ . . . the vineyard // burning, ash sinking over them / like glitter in a snow globe.” The contrast of the whimsical snow globe alongside the ruined vineyard renders the image both dangerous and distant. Comprised of sixteen lines divided into quatrains, the first section concludes:

It felt nothing

like the sugar and foamite of movies

the poppy fields of Oz

dusted with asbestos—a winter made to last

under all this light.

The ersatz foamite, the beauty of the poppy fields and winter light, and longing for the Oz as a stand-in for a secular Eden all intersect here with an adaptive numbness that feels heartbreaking and necessary. The piece further establishes an apocalyptic tone that reverberates throughout The Fire Road.  In addition to the Tubbs Fire that effected Northern California, other fires that receive mentions in the collection include the Woolsey Fire of 2018, the Getty Fire of 2019—two fires that plagued Los Angeles—and the Northern California Camp Fire of 2018. Mentions of Joshua Tree National Park, LA highways like the 405 and 101, the LA neighborhood of Van Nuys, and giant sequoia trees further mark The Fire Road’s rootedness in place.

Many of the collection’s themes further intersect in “The Anorexics Dream of Flight,” a three-part poem, which begins, “Imagine years of famine as a map / folded into our mothers’ chromosomes / a migration longing to winter.” Anorexia here becomes a shared inheritance across maternal lines, a notion that is supported by scientific studies, showing how eating disorders can be transferred across generations. The imperative to “imagine” carries the first section evoking the titular invitation to flight. The section concludes, “Imagine the horizon as hunger. // Imagine the tongue as phantom pain. / Would we sing?” while the second section opens with a third person “we” readying to undertake a literal flight and continues speaking to a loved one. The stanzas are more irregularly shaped, with indents on every other line and eleven-line stanzas. Language erupts towards the end of the second stanza and into the third:

Let it

burn, and never speak of calories. Or both.

It’s okay, Love, to want both

Of everything. Two wings. Too much. To know

the fallout

in honey, the plastic

in placenta, and still eat forever

chemicals straight from the blood stream. And if fire

smokes resin right

out of teeth, we’ll shotgun the neighbors

into our folds

Loss and consumption, the doubling of language with the progression of “two,” “too,” and “to” create delightful and cloying contrasts while feeling personal and political. The word “shotgun” as a verb injects some humor and texture to the somber tone. The final section of the poem takes a more direct epistolary form, beginning “Dear Sierra,” as the speaker navigates eating and the environment. Here the poem returns to still irregular but more evenly arranged quatrains bookended by couplets. In the heart of the section, Yingling writes, “To better fly / songbirds gave up / sweetness.” Again, the contrast is vivid and we see a yearning for something purer as well as an acknowledgment of the trade-offs of modern conveniences.

Having not lived in the West, instead being from western Pennsylvania, the collection transported me even as the ubiquity of fire and smoke in the collection felt difficult to relate to in a visceral way. Nevertheless, the poetic effect of the repetitions of fire felt consuming and immersive. Nicholas Yingling’s The Fire Road is a distinct debut, clearly cementing Yingling as both a poet of the body and place. Stylistically—spare yet concentrated in language and meaning—this collection evokes spareness while demonstrating awareness with compassion and acceptance alongside a deep longing for something better.