Winner of the 2025 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry selected by Pulitzer Prize recipient Diane Seuss, The Fire Passage is a lyric descent in the epic tradition, traveling unto realms unmoored by extreme weather and mysterious illness before resurfacing to the light of a world remade. Recording her experience of a health crisis amid continuous natural disaster, poet Lisa Wells recontextualizes biblically scaled plagues as the entropic catastrophes of our late-stage capitalist society. “I was sick, plainly. / I had my symptoms.” Confronted with the disbelief and “skeptical pity” of medical professionals, Wells brilliantly illuminates the psychological exile of illness where patients, “turned out by the body,” find themselves on “malignancy’s forced pilgrimage.” She remembers the fight for her life as a gauntlet of flame, a path guarded by gatekeepers who acted “as if the wound were in [her] mind.” (“And it was. But it was elsewhere, too.”) This book serves as the answer to a query posed by bad-faith actors and the insightful dream-self alike: “so the wound is a window?” These pages convey grim comfort and radical optimism at once, reminding, “Friend, we die, but do not die alone.” They insist on an affirmative practice of responding to rhetorical questions, building solidarity among the weary who call out, ensuring that they — that we — are not alone with silence. “It comes for all? // It comes for all.” Despite its frank acknowledgment of fire’s lethal nature, the fortifying poetics of this book never preclude the possibility of resurrection or lose their focus on rebuilding a better world from the ashes of this one. “Do not shrink from That Which / razed the scab, will / fertilize the disturbance,” Wells commands us. She entreats us to measure up to a corrective future. “Already its great wave breaks / against the mangroves. // Let us go / and greet it.”
 

Lisa Wells is a poet, nonfiction writer, and editor. Her debut collection, The Fix, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her most recent book, Believers (FSG) was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her work has been published in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, The New York Times, and Orion, and has been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Food and Travel Writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon with Joshua Marie Wilkinson and their son. Together they serve as editors for the Kuhl House Poets Series at the University of Iowa Press.