Ruth Nolan's After the Dome Fire disrupts the flow of desert clichés, presenting a vision of life in the Mojave that is remarkably tender, yet unafraid. Embracing a region of "jagged landscape lacking trails," a region where, it has been said, "no woman should go," Nolan's poems replace the romanticized, masculinized fantasy-image of the Mojave with stories, histories, and images that reflect maternal and indigenous wisdom stripped bare of sentimentalizing language.

By attending to the experiences of being female, out-of-place, or displaced, After the Dome Fire opens up a space from which to reflect upon the meaning of mothering in the desert. Since it is the atypical and the unlikely that animate Nolan's poetics, desert mothering turns out to include shovels, chainsaws, and "a jeep in four-wheel drive."

From Apple Valley to Death Valley (the "unfortunate" name white settlers gave to the Timbisha Shoshone homeland) to the backroad that links the high desert to alpine forests, these poems reject pretty metaphors, opting instead for a directness capable of disclosing the real violence that has always attended the romance of the American West. After the Dome Fire is a remarkable book that places resistance and tenderness on equal footing.

-Rebecca Gaydos is the author of Güera (University of Chicago Press)

After the Dome Fire is an inquiry into the shifting relationships between both flora and desert, and people and the desert we make of each them and they make of us. Wildfires and the work of firefighting are woven throughout. Through red sunsets, God-talking Joshua Trees, fire and sand, Nolan asks the essential question: can we teach tenderness and protection at same time? Can violence, which has always seemed natural, help us raise a daughter or a granddaughter during this lifetime? After the Dome Fire is a beautiful and grotesque confrontation of what hurts, what saves.

-Sara Borjas, author of Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff, winner of a 2020 American Book Award.