With Her Hair on Fire by Christy Prahl

I’m sure it is the times we are living through, but I crave straight talk these days, including in the poetry I read. The believability factor in Christy Prahl’s small, sweet book of prose poems With Her Hair on Fire is matched only by its vigor. Reading this work of brief glimpses, deep remembrance, and abiding daily scrutiny feels like opening the windows after a long closing in. As if the reader can finally let out whatever has been pent up. This is how it feels to breathe, to live fully.

And this is the version of living I want to remember—and will remember because of Prahl’s vivid language, her warnings: as if the world is not laden with yellow jackets (“Please Send Regrets”). Voices of boys catcalling girls, half lager, half hornet (“The Plains”), A girl with her hair on fire is every girl  (“Ekphrastica”). Prahl seems to say there is the necessity of knowing danger and understanding it, as well as the price of that knowing: The hunter knows. In the sight of his rifle […][m]eat for months, ripe for a slather of huckleberries. Orange vest to distract from the terrible… (from “An Introvert Prepares to Reenter the World”).

But the joy of this book is also the everyday, the stripping of sheets, scouring of the sink. The awareness of others, small or significant. Old lovers, houseguests, naked neighbors viewed through un-curtained windows, even petty thieves. In times of national disaster, the tasks of living take on more critical importance, the calm routine of them, the need to get through a day. Keep bees, feed cats, build a swing set in the yard, Prahl tells us in “The Cardinal Route” with a bit of that Midwestern, John Prine-lyric swagger we want to return to repeatedly.

A girl with her hair on fire is every girl.

There is also a quiet belief in the world, in all of us, perhaps. The poems in With Her Hair on Fire settle in my psyche like a dragonfly both hovering and touching down right next to me because of these moments:

Such joy, this rain. Its tiny feet. (“For Charlie, Who Left”)

He keeps my arm around him like a belt / a beginning. (“Soon, the Crocus”)

I keep a full lunar eclipse in my desk to remind myself it’s still possible to be stunned by the weather. (“An Apology for Trivial Living”)

That is finally the emotion that came over me as I read these poems. I felt a bit stunned. As if I knew the same moments, had some of the same memories, but what did I make of them? Not this art, this quick wind around the room, this freshness. I am thankful for a poet who can thrust the worry, the guilt and too much caring out—and let in some sun, new air, some frank clarity through the sealed-up windows we use to protect ourselves. Be generous to yourself as a reader and add these poems into your day, your life, too.

Ellen Stone advises a high-school poetry club, co-hosts a poetry series, Skazat! and edits Public School Poetry in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her latest collection is Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them (Mayapple Press, 2025). She is the recipient of a Good Hart Artist Residency. Ellen’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and Best of the Net.