2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Poetry Prize winner

Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter is a story about leaving religion and coming of age in a world of accelerating climate apocalypses and environmental loss. In her debut collection of poems, H. G. Dierdorff interweaves an investigation of wildfires in Eastern Washington with a personal account of growing up in Christian fundamentalism, calling our attention to the violent histories undergirding both.

“I want you to touch the fire / sparking from my lips” the opening sonnet commands, daring the reader to abandon the safety of analytical distance and draw near to the moment of ignition itself. The voice that emerges is incessant, ecstatic, explosive. Fire erupts from every page, multiplying into rage, desire, judgement, responsibility, and renewal. 

A love song to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a dramatic portrait of a daughter struggling to find her place in her family, and a philosophical exploration of the limits of language and belief, this collection demands the necessity of both pleasure and grief as responses to a world on fire.

“Rife with environmental disaster and social unrest, Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter looks with compassion and rage upon the violence human beings wreak upon the landscape and upon each other.  Skirting a familial past which is never absent from the present, this book is an unwavering debut on behalf of us all.”
—Claudia Keelan, editor of Interim, and author of We Step into the Sea

“Dierdorff records and resists imposed identities: daughter, self, Anthropocene dweller, settler colonist in the U.S. West, sinner fallen from family belief. Sonnets accrete and interlace, the way 'fungi penetrate and sheathe tree roots,' forsaking narrative for simultaneity—how ancient floods formed fluvial sediments nurturing monocrops of Western wheat, how an old story about a rib-formed woman suffers the poet not to speak. The poet grants herself permission by setting a match to old certainties. It is love that fuels the fires raging through these poems, love expressed in this work’s careful craft, its networked, allusive language, its musicality and lyric beauty—love not as a received form, but as a constantly renewing creative act."
—Allison Cobb, author of Plastic: An Autobiography

 “Like 'concentric rings radiating from the heartwood’ of the forest, this stunning debut incises the page with deep and virtuosic music. Perched at the edge of our climate apocalypse, these poems find, between wildfires, a little room, a little grace, to sing of memory and desire. From the 'burnt pines' of the American West, Dierdorff constructs a compelling poetics of entwined personal, historical, and geologic memory. These poems sift, from '[the] smoldering coals' of spiritual and environmental crisis, astonishing new language.”
—Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

“There are few books I love as fiercely as I love H. G. Dierdorff's Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter, and there are few first books as ambitious. 'What's / underneath?' it asks about everything, from the layer of duff beneath a Ponderosa pine to the history of fire suppression that has supercharged Western wildfires to the roles assigned to women in conservative Christian communities. Debunking American myths about climate, nature, gender, sex, history, family, faith, and nation, Dierdorff has written her coming-of-age story as a reckoning with climate crisis, intertwining her intellectual, aesthetic, and sexual maturation with its ecological contexts. Combining formal rigor and experimentation, personal lyric and documentary poetics, Dierdorff has penned a book unlike any other: a feminist field guide to the Anthropocene, a secular hymn 'for the uncertainty of what will grow' after wildfire, a sonnet sequence whose true beloved is the imperiled world.”
—Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man