Betsy Fagin is one of the poets I turn to in times of political, environmental, and humanitarian crisis—essentially, all times. Only an imagination so deeply grounded in the body can be free enough to imagine such new and spacious forms of autonomy. And, she doesn’t leave us there without resources. Her ideas about the role of care in the daily struggles faced by the autonomous against those who seek to rule them are incredibly generous. Fagin draws our attention to the present moment, reminding us that “the small things” are everything, such as experiencing our hearts beat, or breathing air that “is an interface where relationship begins.” Fires Seen from Space affirms that poetry is a form of care and a vessel where poets have been stowing vital knowledge for many millennia.
—Stacy Szymaszek

Fires seen from space, as inextinguishable ardors, as manifold extinctions that persist. In Betsy Fagin’s poems, cosmogonic breath burns, and yet also the gravity of terrestrial resistance. “Life in another place,” in the country that lies beyond the half-lived life, in a life that is never “ours”: the other life that must be reinvented.
—Giovanbattista Tusa

Such sleek, smart poems—missives from an adrift future, beyond regret, their surfaces smooth as glass and just as shocking when you smack into one mid-flight. To me, this is a book about forces, both the passive entropy we pretend characterizes nature and the pushing forward we assign ourselves: all of our “scissor play among / ancient cut forests / and melted down paradise.” Or it’s about how we’re stuck choosing which swift-moving current we’ll struggle against and which we’ll let take us—mutually aided or not—further into a world that “pairs well with basic / survival fears.” This mesmerizing book taught me a strange lesson—something like, whatever you bring your focus to immediately loses or gains power—there’s no in-between, “no moving forward, / no moving back.” And yet: “I declare / I am determined to see everything / everywhere, in everyone.”
—Jacqueline Waters

Thinking with stanzas. Betsy Fagin’s prosodic tour de force returns us again and again to the emergencies we live among and the almost unbearable beauty we stand to lose. Fires Seen from Space stands foursquare for liberation, revolution, and love. “You are beautiful. // Your planet is beautiful. // And all of it will burn—it’s burning now.”
—Kevin Davies

In Fagin’s Fires Seen From Space, the titular metaphor inscribes both the aerial coordinates and diagnostic urgency that pervades the book. It is a collection of almost ambient lyric, jerking and coasting across a database of context, stunningly patterned and mutually inhabited, and beginning to flame at all points—a world, on fire, viewed from above. … Fires Seen From Space is imbued with an activist’s awareness of the interlocking systems that enforce our current nation-state hell of oligarchy and ethnonationalism, as well as the possible strategies for intervention. These poems weave threads from movements—against bank and state violence, for reproductive justice and climate rebellion—into a dense tapestry of inter- and intraplanetary afrofuturist anti-imperialism which drafts, kite-like, as an attention to living.
—Jacob Kahn, Poetry Project Newsletter