🌍 FIREFALL by Heather Lang-Cassera Confronts the Quiet Catastrophes of Climate Change Through Lyrical Eco-Poetry
A searing new poetry collection confronts the climate crisis with lyrical urgency and quiet revolt
Portland, OR — What if the world burned and nobody listened? In Firefall, Heather Lang-Cassera's haunting and timely new poetry collection, readers are beckoned to bear witness—to the fire, the flood, and the fragile, fleeting beauty we still call home.
Out June 24, 2025 from Unsolicited Press, Firefall is not your typical book of ecopoems. With breathtaking control of form—from whispering free verse to spiraling pantoums—Lang-Cassera invites us to sit in the tension between awe and devastation, activism and grief. Here, language becomes both weapon and wound. These poems do not shout. They simmer.
Lang-Cassera, former Clark County Poet Laureate and a celebrated voice in contemporary poetry, doesn't just write about environmental catastrophe—she makes you feel it in your lungs. In Firefall, the landscape is not a backdrop but a body: bruised, burning, beautiful. And in that body, we recognize ourselves.
“Do not underestimate the traces / we have swiftly / made of us,” she writes.
Early praise calls the collection “a quiet, necessary journey with a clear and urgent call” (Samuel Piccone) and “essential reading that will leave its mark in the best possible way” (Letisia Cruz).
With Firefall, Lang-Cassera joins the ranks of poets confronting the Anthropocene—offering not just witness, but reckoning. This is poetry for the world we live in now—and the one we still hope to save.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Heather Lang-Cassera is an award-winning poet, educator, and ceramist based in Nevada. She teaches creative writing at Nevada State University, served as Clark County Poet Laureate, and is the author of Gathering Broken Light (Unsolicited Press), Where Hunger Must Be Feral, and I was the girl with the moon-shaped face. She serves as Poetry Editor for Black Fox Literary Magazine and editor at Tolsun Books.
