All the Fires of Wind and Light

Book excerpt: Poetry. Environmental Studies. California Interest. Winner of a 2020 PEN Oakland Award. ALL THE FIRES OF WIND AND LIGHT invites readers to find themselves in the wild, even in the most challenging times. Drawing from personal history, ancestry, and explorations ranging from the Bay of Bengal to the Sierra Nevada, the Cascade Mountains, and beyond, Khosla takes readers into worlds that are all but hidden--among the best-kept secrets of our forests--and sometimes all but lost. In this moment of time, when we are witnessing the progression of Earth's seeming destruction through climate change, along with an increased visibility of man's immoral tendencies, comes a book of poems so lovely in its undertaking, so infused with scientific knowledge and imagistic beauty, that a thousand candles are lit in the cavern of despair, writes Katherine Hastings, Sonoma County Poet Laureate Emerita and author of Shakespeare & Stein Walk into a Bar. Maya's work also shows sudden flares of understanding about the sheer scale of fragmentation, even disappearance, of our forests and other ecosystems. And yet these poems are fortified by nutrients and hope in the powers of natural rejuvenation. Maya Khosla's dazzling poems in ALL THE FIRES OF WIND AND LIGHT are dense with beauty and wisdom...Fire ecology, a widely misunderstood field, is a central theme, writes Lucille Lang Day, coeditor of FIRE AND RAIN: ECOPOETRY OF CALIFORNIA Maya Khosla is an evangelist for poetry and its ability to expand our understanding of our internal and external worlds. Her work is grounded in the intersection between the human and natural environment, and it is easily accessible to anyone who has the opportunity to hear or read it.--Kristen Madsen, Director of Creative Sonoma.