The Arsonist's Letters

Comprised of poetry written over the course of more than two decades, Michael Tyrell's The Arsonist's Letters reckons with a radically changing landscape, where "infestations of coincidence" overlap with "reflective / tricks and rungless ladders," and increased surveillance meets the threat of looming extinction. Throughout, memorable historical and contemporary figures emerge: a cousin mistaken for the abducted Lindbergh child; a boy who must make a bargain to keep from starving in Mussolini's Italy; "children [...] / who swear live inside them /the entire populations of small countries." Including moving elegies for a dying mother and poems that puzzle over difficult family secrets, the collection also stands as a paean to correspondence itself, celebrating not only the near-lost art of letter writing but the spiritual necessity of the written message: "You carry an unsent card in your coat like immunity papers/ from one ruined place to another / where it is, at least, somehow, / always spring."