Pascal's Fire

In Pascal's Fire, an unnamed speaker navigates a world where a possible God comes in the shape of a cardinal, disappears, speaks in the voice of Georgia O'Keeffe, pilfers ruined things, and paints the desert with bones. Driven by sound, heartbreak, and a baffling sense of the limits and possibilities of language, the speaker of this poetic prose meditation sets out into a strange, dream-like wilderness where lyric and narrative meet, time dissolves, and where figures and voices as various as Moses, the apostle Paul, Virginia Woolf, Blaise Pascal, Flaubert's F幨icit? Zora Neale Hurston, and the Greek god Hestia gather in a colloquy to form a "cloud of witnesses." Born out of a region of stuttering prophets, preachers, the gift of tongues, the psalms of praise, lament, and imprecation, Pascal's Fire negotiates the pressure and wonder of the unknown and the tension and play of belief and disbelief. Poised at the edge of speech and sight, the speaker tries to puzzle out the risk, embarrassment, vulnerability, and instability of words as they brush up against grief, a dying woman, desert heat, wind, thirst, and the sound of an IV drip.