Picture this: every evening from late spring to early fall, two planes lift off from airports in the western United States and fly through the sunset, each headed for an active wildfire, and then another, and another. From 10,000 feet above ground, the pilots can spot the glow of a fire, and occasionally the smoke enters the cabin, burning the eyes and throat.

The pilots fly a straight line over the flames, then U-turn and fly back in an adjacent but overlapping path, like they’re mowing a lawn. When fire activity is at its peak, it’s not uncommon for the crew to map 30 fires in one night. The resulting aerial view of the country’s most dangerous wildfires helps establish the edges of those fires and identify areas thick with flames, scattered fires and isolated hotspots.

“I hear // our fires / are seen / from space,” writes Betsy Fagin in her latest book of the same name. Here, rumors are central to knowing. Detections, too: location, direction, speed, proximity, frequency, intensity. To know what? To know the danger.

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. This “overview effect”—the grand, enlarging cognitive experience astronauts describe viewing earth from space (“a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus”)—slightly abstracts the daily catastrophes of earth in order to more fully sense them, their impacts. If we follow the metaphor, Fagin then is one of our pilots the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration describes, one of the ones we count on to map thirty fires in one night, in one book I guess.

Of course, space is exponentially beyond the flight of those pilots; to witness our fires there forces a dialogue not only about the alarming scale of these catastrophes, but our great capacity to see over this distance and our monumental inability to do anything about it. And what are the fires Fagin is mapping? Climate fatalism, techno-accelerationism, informational dysregulation, fascist inundation—all the shit, more and more gnarled and mundane forms of it: “synthetic trees / carbon suck // our drugged / waterways / moss wall.” Tonally, we go from inured humor to outright panic, balancing just over a chasm of despair, the daily feed, our individual sinkholes and collective flux. Balancing just:

As these hells harden all around us, Fagin’s poems become the site for an ongoing praxis of diagnosis and resistance that continues the intersectional work she has cultivated across her poetry and public projects. Fires Seen From Space is likewise 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. “Resistance is beautiful,” Fagin reminds us in this eponymous poem and section of the book; also, theory and action go hand in hand. In NOAA’s summation, Frontline responders do the heavy lifting when it comes to fighting and managing wildfires, but they’re often helped by the view from higher up. Fagin provides us just such a view from above.

Aerial perspective is not merely diagnostic, of course. Aesthetically, the aerial provides a charged, compacted perspective, which this book uses to (s)train our gaze, like a digital map’s layer feature: now showing air quality index, now showing terrain. The poems bob between a beautifully denuded two-dimensional vertical layering and sudden surges of horizontal, first-person lyricism. Saturated yet winnowy, exposed to currents of air and aspects of days, there is a tidy slipperiness to lines that haltingly run on, and skip, in their maintenance of sense:

As in this poem, “Resistance: given teeth in order to attack,” the motion of thought in Fires Seen From Space largely spills forward (except in its first and last sections, which, as an extended assemblage, bound more unpredictably out). This syntactical rush, at times, is hard to keep up with, to see clear reflections in—intentionally, I suspect, taking advantage of one of poetry’s most gripping sensory states. Fagin does such steep prosody well. In a review of a previous work, Sally McCallum formulates the drive of Fagin’s poetry as an agency of the abstract, “of participilized verbs, of absent pronouns,” an abstract I’d argue that works to shade the real, dire contours of our world, at present. Energetically, there are times when lines shift so suddenly what was just concrete becomes abstract, and the waters crest above the head, blurring the senses. Other times, a line seems to focus the page, a figure signaling: the self.

Fires Seen From Space is (for the lyric lovers) composed of largely short, individually titled poems, the effects of which are (for the book lovers) more aggregate than particular. The six titled sections of the book create the organizing consonance and, I feel, the stakes-making. Taken together—“All so sun (Book 1),” “Beauty is established,” Movement theory,” “We have everything we need,” “Resistance is beautiful,” and “All so sun (Book 2)”—they angle the book’s arc with a navigational ethic and communal charge. No doubt, there are singular poems worth gushing over and suites worth returning to, but I found myself falling for different poems and pleasures each time I turned and turned through the book. One of Fagin’s gifts as a poet is to be able to write for multiple minds at once, providing reasons and materials for each reader. My eye, for one, caught on the book’s earthy inclinations (“Common blue violets / bloom all try-hard (deer-resistant) // under the black walnut through holes / and cut-out toes”) and convictions (“I know the garden / this lot will become”). It caught on the repeated entrances of the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, doomsday scenarios, and Mars colonization; on the propulsive industry of rhetorical questions; on formal repetition and alteration. Across the book, stanzas are equally yet variously (two, three, five lines) proportioned, as are the breaks between them. Shape is not style here but a terrestrial concern, a metamorphic blend of organic and inorganic languages—stanzas compressing into syntactic marble. Surely, other eyes will catch on other lines, and readers cling to different nodes. Fires Seen From Space signals to each their own and to us all, at once.

I was first introduced to Betsy Fagin’s work a few years ago during an online reading of librarians and archivists we both took part in. Curated by Anna Gurton-Wachter for The Brooklyn Rail's “The New Social Environment,” Fagin, Gurton-Wachter, and I read along with Lyric Hunter and Morgan Vō, all of us sharing this commonality as “information” workers of some sort. Fagin has worked as a librarian professionally and even brought information work into her activism, helping to build The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street, for instance. I mention this because information work—gathering, organizing, storing, retrieving, disseminating—is fundamentally embedded in all liberatory projects, especially as information becomes the primary currency of our time. In Fires Seen From Space, Fagin is well aware of information as a central figure and disruptive force. Information management and mismanagement, deterioration, co-optation and usefulness across time form the bedrock of this landscape. Fagin engages the public domain literally (the “All so sun” sections of the book “metabolize” language from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises just as it entered the public domain) and figuratively throughout, rueing our information plight and tending to our collective predicament:

Information access has failed, conflagrations abound. Is it fatalism to be honest about our situation and prospects? It’s almost absurd the range of shitty outcomes we, on earth, are facing. Fires Seen From Space offers a ledge for this grief, and an activating kick, as hope oscillates between its poles, “Resistance is beautiful” and “Resistance : futile.” These two poems are a microcosm of Fires Seen From Space, a day in the life in the Pyrocene. In search of safety for those who need it, this book is one to cling to: “A route to river / mapped out, seeds for future harvest.”