This Incendiary Season
Travel with Willard as she undertakes the ultimate road trip—a one-month long exploration and encounter of the entire subcontinent of India. Instantly and utterly, Willard fell in love with the people, culture, arts and literature of India and returned home forever changed. Each day, out of sorts, she encountered both the beautiful and the poverty, the ecstatic and the solemn and her poems document her transformation and uncertainty.
“Departures and arrivals, the endless parade of bodies seeking landings, seeking flight, and the “and and” of life and death, indiscriminate, making march, this is an unstinting brocade of Kathleen Willard’s This Incendiary Season. Structured dialectically, through near and far, home and away, a dying mother and the crush of Hindi strangers, Willard’s poems do not flinch at the threshold of human suffering.”
Matthew Cooperman, Colorado State University,
Associate Professor of Poetry.
“Anyone who has ever hoped to outrun grief will find themselves in these lush, gorgeous poems. They confront the sterility of modern death with the bright colors, wheeling birds, and jangling silver bracelets of India. Not just a travelogue, but a voyage into loss and redemption.”
Dr. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, Indiana University,
Professor of Geography
