Sundress Publications announces the release of Julia Bouwsma’s Death Fluorescence. In this triumphant and visually stunning collection, poet Julia Bouwsma expertly crafts an exploration of life on this Earth woven with the wonders of parasitic worms, Jewish identity, and the persistent neurosis of mice. Grounded in visualizations of nature bordering on the spiritual, with moons that hemorrhage, ghost apples, and a quarry’s snow-mounded shoulder, one can dig their fingers into the soil of this collection and watch the speaker grow throughout. Each page is “an entire universe of starry luminescent decay”—from the contrapuntal to the Markov Sonnet, these poems are anything but typical. The poet’s poignant language demands to be heard and asks the reader to “bite down among stippled wormholes and taste our blinding sweetness.” Bouwsma herself puts it best: this collection “will lift into the sky like a cathedral toward heaven”—it is transcendent, it is revolutionizing, it is fluorescent.
Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, writes that “in dexterously shapeshifting forms that are by turns classically virtuosic and formally inventive, these poems arabesque, sinew, and coil around language with a gorgeously muscular lyricism that is graceful and unerringly confident.”
You can purchase your copy at https://sundress-publications.square.site
Julia Bouwsma is Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate. In 2024 she received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She is the acclaimed author of Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018), and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017) and serves as Director for Webster Library in Kingsfield, Maine.
