As the Den Burns

As the Den Burns is a debut collection that renders a sublime world on the verge of vanishing. Elegiac and surreal, primal and lyrical, these unpredictable poems vault from Tallahassee vigils to flooded gardens after a hurricane’s landfall. Reading this collection is like swimming into the ocean; you float weightless amid waves of resistance, then knots form in your gut because something unseen moves beneath you. Mythology and song collide in this stunning collection as unruly poems waver from lifeguard chairs and cathedrals to lamps in underwater caverns. Rapier’s poetry could be spray painted beneath a beach pier; every stanza shifts rapidly without apology, the shape of the words like a signature.

"In this scorching debut, Forrest Rapier creates soundscapes lush as Florida. 'The word, ' he writes, 'is much like the land, ' and these poems are lit with trouble: a shapeshifting father whose absence imbues every line, a rowdy cast of characters with 'wild chickens for brains, ' and a luminous 'I' at the center, one of the 'lightning-struck lost boys' on the Florida coast, 'keeping watch' and working to 'keep the love door ajar.' The fire burns bright in these poems, but we feel--by the end of the book--that the light by which Rapier works and keeps watch comes from him." --Ryan Vine, author of WARD and To Keep Him Hidden, "As the Den Burns thickens and teems with the hardscrabble lives of its Gulf Coast inhabitants. Violence and tenderness, filial piety and escape, disasters and the wild, dangerous beauty of the natural world all appear in Forrest Rapier's stunning heatwave of a debut collection. 'Everything here/is feeding off something else, ' he writes, 'Some beasts never evolve.'" --Leona Sevick, author of Lion Brothers , "Part personal mythology, part fever dream on the Florida coast, As the Den Burns introduces a poet with an unmistakable, razor-sharp voice that gets under your skin. Witty, sonic, and place-haunted, these poems have the narrative acuity of Frank Stanford and the fierce imagination of a visual artist steeped in a Bosch-like obsessiveness. Forrest Rapier's poetry is reckless yet accurate, immediate yet historical, cursed yet brimming. The world is on fire in these poems and Rapier is our guide through the rubble, begging us: 'Save what you can.'" --Nicole Stockburger, author of Nowhere Beulah

FORREST RAPIER has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Cold Mountain Review, Levee, and Rabid Oak, among many others. He has received fellowships from Looking Glass Falls, Sewanee Writers Conference, and has held writing residencies at the University of Virginia and Brevard College. He recently received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where he now lives and hikes the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains.