Fire Ashes Wings
A Chapbook of Poems Giving Voice to Women in Myths and the Arts
The poems in Fire Ashes Wings follow—with cunning originality—in the footsteps of Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Alicia Ostriker. These poems are probing, widely and wildly imagined, and, best of all, deeply human. Ruth Kessler’s poems are multifaceted lyrical jewels, sparking, igniting, shining. Their refracted light is most welcome.— Ralph Black
Fire Ashes Wings contains many wonderful poems with striking imagery. In them, Ruth Kessler explores mythic female figures from Leda to Alice in Wonderland like “a timeless messenger of the Muses who/... mend[s] this world into song.”— Enid Shomer
A portrait of any mythic figure is a portrait of us, and what we want from a mythic redux is a fresh bodying forth of old truths from the untold interstices of extant story. In this sequence of choral voicings, often dramatically monologic, Ruth Kessler allows a host of female personae from myth, art history, and literature to speak or be seen, each newly imagined in a counterpoint both mercuric and illuminating…— Lisa Rass Spaar