Death Fluorescence

In this triumphant and visually stunning collection, poet Julia Bouwsma expertly crafts an exploration of life on this Earth woven with the wonders of parasitic worms, Jewish identity, and the persistent neurosis of mice. Grounded in visualizations of nature bordering on the spiritual, with moons that hemorrhage, ghost apples, and a quarry’s snow-mounded shoulder, one can dig their fingers into the soil of this collection and watch the speaker grow throughout. Each page is “an entire universe of starry luminescent decay”—from the contrapuntal to the Markov Sonnet, these poems are anything but typical. The poet’s poignant language demands to be heard and asks the reader to “bite down among stippled wormholes and taste our blinding sweetness.” Bouwsma herself puts it best: this collection “will lift into the sky like a cathedral toward heaven”—it is transcendent, it is revolutionizing, it is fluorescent.

“Julia Bouwsma’s Death Fluorescence gives witness to a decaying world with both clarity and compassion. These are poems of blood, sugar, and soil—paeans to a keenly intimate relationship with land and place juxtaposed against family histories of diaspora, displacement, genocide, and epigenetic trauma. Here, profoundly intertwined elements of environmental crisis, the false binaries of self and other, as well as the false binaries of self and environment, are contextualized within the rising tides of fascism and white supremacy—configured as a kind of deepening abscess or infection—culminating in terrible grief, and terrible beauty. In dexterously shapeshifting forms that are by turns classically virtuosic and formally inventive, these poems arabesque, sinew, and coil around language with a gorgeously muscular lyricism that is graceful and unerringly confident. ‘The poet’s job is to keep seeking out pain, to force some beauty / from all this mess, to hold the hornet up to the candle flame and watch / the world through its burning wing’ Bouwsma writes, and this stunning revelation of a book is pure fire, light, and prism.”

—Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50

“In Julia Bouwsma’s opening poem she writes ‘Each familiar suddenly unfamiliar,’ and in many ways this line is her Ars Poetica. This is Maine’s hard rural landscape and its hard-earned debts, tied to the greater world: foreign wars, Charlottesville, Jewish history, working the farm with NPR playing in a back pocket, diasporic knowledge and survival. This is a landscape of ‘pick-up trucks and fishing shacks,’ shit and mud, ‘the kind of shame you can’t shake,’ of roundworms and old ballads slurred by fathers. And, mostly, these are poems of the heart, fists, work, love—sonnets of a grandmother’s going and grief, and a notation of working the earth with a specificity worthy of any botanist. To be lit by Death Fluorescence is to enter a world both familiar and strange even to those who live it, a series of verbal matryoshka opening the language, by one of America’s most inventive and investigative poets.

—Sean Thomas Dougherty, Author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys