Fire in the Pasture:
Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets
Peculiar Pages, 2011
Poetry Anthology
Winner, 2011 Award in Poetry, Association for Mormon Letters
Cover art by Casey Jex Smith
With a Preface by the Editor, a Foreword by Susan Elizabeth Howe, and an Afterword by Ángel Chaparro Sáinz
Available in paperback and limited edition hardcover (paired w/Field Notes on Language and Kinship). Only three limited editions remaining. (More on the limited edition via this link.)
Follow this link for a sampler of twenty poems from the anthology.
Order from Amazon ⎪ Paperback: $27.99 + shipping / Kindle: $4.99
Order Limited Edition ⎪ $100.00 (includes shipping)
Fire in the Pasture collects and preserves many of Mormonism’s most potent poetic voices from the early twenty-first century, making them available for generations to come.
—Angela Hallstrom
Novelist and editor
Review for BYU Studies Quarterly
Everywhere in [Fire in the Pasture] readers will find evidence of artistry, of control and discipline, of structure wedded to content. . .of poetry.
What they will not discover, however, is Mormon verse. That is, doctrine scantly or overtly dressed up in the costumes of rhyme and rhythm. Some poems are firmly embedded within easily recognizable LDS beliefs, but none of them are overwhelmed by those beliefs. Many of the pieces solidly and powerfully affirm and re-affirm the core concepts of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints without becoming exercises in sentimentality or cliché. And many of them reflect the intriguing recognition that, even without explicit LDS references to matters of faith and practice, they could only have been written by someone with an LDS background. As Susan Elizabeth Howe states in her Foreword, “To perceive of life as having an eternal purpose and of choices as having eternal consequences leads Mormon poets to serious engagement with their subjects,” whether those subjects entail experiences recalled and re-invented, contexts imagined or actual.
Fire in the Pasture is not a volume to be read in a day, or a week, or perhaps in a month or longer. Page after page reveals fruits to be tasted, savored, lingered over, and transmuted into ideas and images that may change lives. Each reader will discover favorites that speak directly to the individual’s mind and heart. . . . [A]t one point or another, with one poem or another, the anthology is likely to feed any hunger, resonate with any need.
—Michael R. Collings
Poet and Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & Literature
Pepperdine University
Review on Collings’ Notes
With Fire in the Pasture [. . .] editor Tyler Chadwick casts his net wide to offer readers some of the best LDS poetry produced since the millennium’s turn. With his preface, along with Susan Howe’s contextualizing foreword, readers are well-equipped to form their own opinions about the state of LDS poetry. Most readers will undoubtedly feel at ease browsing its pages, discovering old friends, and perhaps forming some new acquaintances. [. . .]
This anthology is well worth its moderate price and it is easily accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. If readers want truly thoughtful and articulate expressions of and insights into the many voices with which modern Mormonism speaks one would be hard-pressed to locate a more convenient source.
—Brent Corcoran
Review for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
Okay, so this is a little bit misleading because I haven’t read the entire tome of poems yet. I’m a cherry picker when it comes to poetry—rifling through the pages reading what catches my eye or jives with my current mood. (Reading a poetry book straight through, cover to cover just seems wrong. Like nails-on-a-chalkboard wrong.) But I own this one and I love it! Chadwick did an amazing job editing this work. There is such a breadth of work and so many poets to explore, this is one I’ll keep returning to. This book is well worth the money—I promise it’s bigger than you think it will be!
—Laura Craner
Teacher and writer
Goodreads Review