ROUGH FIRE by Ronald Dzerigian

In his Rough Fire, Dzerigian does no less than alchemize California’s Central Valley—its landscape, its inhabitants, its literary giants (Levine, Levis), and, most notably, the poet’s family, made and given—into a recipe for living, thereby discovering, naming, creating, and preserving. From the directive that opens this book, to its concluding and deeply satisfying, indeed oracular, moments, I am moved by the very specific love, for place and for people, that this book possesses, and I am instructed by the achievement of that love: how it culminates in the art of poetry, an art, in Dzerigian’s hands, of sharing.

–Kathy Fagan, author of Sycamore

Like Frost, Ronald Dzerigian is, at heart, a regional poet, his poems deeply rooted into California’s Central Valley— its parched thirst in summer, shrouded by fog in winter, dreary or beautiful by turns. More important, he bears witness not only to the hard-won endurance of people and place but also to his own family’s history, since the two seem almost inseparable.  Nothing in Rough Fire is sentimental or nostalgic; there is always a price to be paid, a legacy at risk. In an America that seems increasingly divisive, incoherent, and blinded by the mirrors of entitlement, Dzerigian’s clear, steady and intimate voice surely is one we need to hear.

–Peter Everwine, author of Listening Long and Late

Ronald Dzerigian’s Rough Fire is a dark, Whitmanesque evocation of the San Joaquin Valley. In Dzerigian’s “harsh valley,” hostility and boredom are punctuated by drownings, suicides, and funerals. Even the local flora and fauna—“tarweed,” “cheatgrass,” “blueweed,” “hawkmoth”—straddle a liminal zone between lyrical beauty and a dismal, implacable brutality. This is not a land for the faint of heart, but Dzerigian speaks for those who persevere and are strong enough to carve out a life: “We live in it, we are buried here, / still breathing, and nothing stops us.”

–Gary Young, author of Even So: New and Selected Poems