Azaleas on Fire, by Gabrielle Langley

100% of author’s proceeds will be donated to the Houston Literacy Foundation.

Praise for Azaleas on Fire

Conceived “in the month of pearls” as she tells us in her poem “Birthstone,” Gabrielle Langley is a poet of true luminosity, stringing her “English words like pearls” across continents — from Paris and Milan to Katyn and Istanbul, Lebanon and beyond. I find her to be a remarkable imagist of postmodernity. In Azaleas on Fire, she leads her reader through gardens of flowers rescued from romantic tradition through irony where the fragrance of narcissus and gardenias meets charred wood, “the burn of salt water rising to swallow small children.” She weaves delicacy with strength, a floral lace that is beautiful, tough, untearable. Yet even the image of lace becomes the fabric of a wedding dress turned to pentagrams, exhumed and rotting. These poems dance with a wild grace, a ferocity on the page that is both “field of lilies/and swords.” Gabrielle Langley’s Azaleas on Fire is a collection needed in our historical moment, a prophetic tango to be reckoned with. 

Robin Davidson, Houston Poet Laureate, 2015-2017, author of Luminous Other

In reading Gabrielle Langley’s most recent collection of poems, Azaleas on Fire, I am reminded that, in times of turmoil and disheartenment, all we want to hear is a voice that reassures us that the world will, eventually, be set right again.  In these poems, this is precisely what we get.  We mourn and we love; we hope and we despair. But regardless of the loss we encounter in these pages, we keep finding doses of courage and linguistic beauty at every turn. This is what Langley’s poems do: they make us “feel the birth of everything.”  Reading her poetry is like “lighting a candle against the dark.”  

Octavio Quintanilla, San Antonio Poet Laureate, 2018-2020, author of If I Go Missing

Poet Gabrielle Langley and her poems dance entwined. Azaleas on Fire offers up an erotic magic that spans a past in Istanbul, Beirut, Paris climbing into the present.  We eavesdrop on intimate confessions where flowers are called out, where scents are conjured among pages that drip tantalizing tastes. This is a book that commands our attention through delicately formed confrontations as well as fierce attacks that cut into cruelty. Her finely spun poems land on these pages ripe, robust and beautifully crafted.

Fran Sanders, Director of Public Poetry

With the posture and poise of longtime dancers, the poems of Azaleas on Firemove so gracefully across the page that the reader is hardly aware of the strength and skill it must have taken to make them. These are poems of deep attention and careful craft, otherworldly in their beauty yet grounded in the rich, sensuous detail of the material world and pulsing so vibrantly with duende that we feel their wounds and renewals as our own.

Melissa Studdard, author of I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast

Azaleas on Firenavigates the wreckage of history—familial and global—showing that what defines us is often lost to vast stretches of time and distance. These poems are dauntless in their reaching across those distances—from Greek myths to the horrors of World War II, from the hypocritical “war on terror” to the power a lover holds over the body. They are a traveler’s poems, the result of a life spent plumbing distances within and without, insisting on “a love song / in the middle / of a freezing / rain.”

Ryler Dustin, author of Heavy Lead Birdsong

Though her poems are technically complex and layered, Langley’s execution feels effortless with no obscurities. Her lines are lean, yet packed with exotic, sensual imagery, and poetic moments that whisper Old World settings and personal history.   Azaleas on Fire is fabric in motion, perfumed with dance and midnight.  

Chris Wise, author of Colliding with Orion

Azaleas on Fire is a bouquet of elegant, sensual, and surprising poems that are so alive you’ll believe the flower names on the pages are emitting a fragrance. Gabrielle Langley deftly moves the reader through dreamscapes where “petals… sing in my mouth,” to memories of a man from Lebanon, to dancing the tango with gardenias in her hair, to her Southern childhood where women pretended to be Cinderellas and tucked their children into bed at night with poems. But not all scents the author follows are sweet. Her keen insight delves into the reality of violence against women, discrimination, and those who would torture because they “don’t like the sound of your prayers.”  Rarely does a first book burn with such emotional power and craft while remaining eloquent and gentle. This book is truly, “like a flower hidden in the ashes.”

Carolyn Dahl, author of The Painted Door

The poems that petal these pages are as powerful as they are beautiful, pulling up from deep roots. One can’t help but hear echoes of Neruda in its earthy and fragrant lyricism, revealing secrets that are “deep blue,” drenched in “moon-white skin” and candlelight. Every word is a seedling—a gift. 

Stacy R. Nigliazzo, author of Sky the Oar

Gabrielle Langley takes us on a dance of language in her new collection of poems, Azaleas on Fire. The dance takes place out of urgency, saying only what needs to be said, which provides a tremendous amount of luminescence from these extremely well made poems.  It’s as if each poem, line by line, is a flower petal that shadows over you, then falls, and lands deep inside you, never to be forgotten.

John Milkereit, author of Drive the World in a Taxicab

Gabrielle Langley’s Azaleas on Fire takes us through an extravaganza of memories from the American Southern countryside as well as those collective memories found in our histories of war, love, and politics, the nuances of Greek literature, the shades of memory and experiences in Germany, France, Italy, and the eastern Mediterranean areas of Lebanon and Turkey. We go fishing with worms in a southern lake, we go to Europe, we return to pecan orchards, and bayous. With Langley’s skilled sense of poetry, she leads us through dream scenes, through dances, and through flower gardens. We whisper and hide among the ghosts in Italy’s La Scalaopera house. We experience the “blushed apricot” that lingers in the middle of the wonderfully sensual poem, “Lipstick.” And we read entire poems dedicated to the glories of yellow and red. This book is clustered with the multiple colors of life — sky blues, the saffron of the Middle East, red lilies, gold leaf, silver thread, vanishing purple, and black silk… Azaleas on Fire, bears glowing embers, a universe of burning delight.

Glynn M. Irby, Texas poet and editor