Fires of Heaven

In his previous full-length collections, poet James B. Nicola has taken readers to New York City, backstage at the theater, and into the world of art and artists. Now the destination is of another order, the very Fires of Heaven, where a soul may smolder not only from blind faith but also through questioning, contempla­tion, and searing skepticism. By journey's end, the reader comes full circle, as this sequence of "religious" poems (or are they?) aims to achieve precisely what the etymology of the word religion suggests, linking us once again to divine creation, to the miracle of everyday existence, and, perhaps even more urgently, to each other.