First the Burning
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FIRST THE BURNING
Catie Rosemurgy

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This sold-out chapbook is available as as free ebook as of March 2020. Read or download the PDF here.

Excerpt

They say that just before the fire arrived, animals came pouring silently
out of the forest, all kinds together, heading to the river, “enemies and friends,”
their tongues hanging out.

For days before, the sun was “red” and “swollen,”
“many times its normal size.”
The moon was “not itself.”

The earth is always showing us how to have the wildest experiences.
While she runs, I remain still and mark her trail
like an axe blaze on a tree.

Also this: up close, her pupil moves quickly,
like a whole other creature living in her head.
If you don’t know what I mean, maybe it’s been too long
since you’ve had a friend.

Haven’t you ever been a rough, rough man a hundred miles away
from even a scrap of soft cloth to rub against your skin?
Then you look down and see a bolt of silk.

Not once such a man? I don’t believe you.

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Description

SOLD OUT
Published: August 2018
7 x 7 | 42 pages

Cover art: typescript, matches, compressed charcoal, eraser, fire, river water
Giclée print on Mohawk i-Cream Eco Tone 80 lb cover
Laser-print interior on cream 70 lb text
Hand sewn in natural twine

Limited to 150 numbered copies

BLOOF BOOKS CHAPBOOK SERIES
Volume 3: Issue 7 (2018)
ISSN 2373-163X

First the Burning begins with a girl emerging soot-smeared from a river, having miraculously survived a fire that engulfed everything for miles. “Every so often there’s a fire that changes everything,” she explains. But what if that fire somehow returns to burn again, impossibly, every day? What happens to the girl who survives, who does she become? As she persists in the cycle of daily disaster, she begins to wonder if there is more than one girl, herself and another, a not-quite twin, in her perpetually scorched surroundings. Every day as the townspeople are “strung onto the fire like beads,” we lose track of which fire is raging now, and which girl in these burning woods is which.

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Additional information

Author

Rosemurgy, Catie

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