With Her Hair on Fire by Christy Prahl (Roadside Press, 2025)
Christy Prahl’s With Her Hair on Fire is a collection of prose poems that read like dispatches from the liminal zones between memory and invention, confession and fable. The chapbook brims with domestic detail—laundromats, hibiscus bushes, yellow houses, hummingbird feeders—yet each poem veers quickly from the ordinary into the surreal or mythic, where a grandfather grilling hot dogs becomes an emblem of both tenderness and discipline, or a dream of a talking elk dissolves into slapstick majesty.
Prahl’s style balances candor with wit. She allows her speakers to be vulnerable—drinking Moscato alone, grieving a lost love, stumbling back into the world after seclusion—while also giving them sharp humor and a sly intelligence. Her lines often pivot in tone, moving from lyrical observation to absurdist turn in a heartbeat, creating the sense that life’s gravity and its comic strangeness are inseparable.
The thematic range is wide, yet cohesive: family histories, lost and lingering lovers, landscapes scarred by both weather and memory, the rituals of food, faith, and work. Several poems wrestle with inheritance—of trauma, of survival, of domestic expectation—while others move outward into ecological imagination, giving voice to deer, hummingbirds, even electricity itself. The ekphrastic pieces, particularly the title poem “Ekphrastica,” extend this attention into the realm of art and myth, offering a figure of the girl “with her hair on fire” as both an image of danger and resilience.
Prahl’s great gift lies in how she domesticates the surreal without diminishing its strangeness. She writes of backyard swings and oil drums with the same seriousness she applies to questions of mortality, intimacy, and loss. Each poem feels like a room one enters—a room furnished with recognizable objects, but haunted by the uncanny.
With Her Hair on Fire situates itself in the lineage of prose poets like Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Diane Seuss, while maintaining its own distinct voice: one that is at once conversational, unflinching, and fiercely imaginative. These poems make the case that the prose poem remains an ideal vessel for contemporary experience—fragmented, comic, mournful, and incandescent.
In the end, Prahl’s chapbook does what the best poetry does: it names what’s fragile, it burns through what’s false, and it leaves us, the readers, singed but illuminated.
The chapbook’s cohesion is enhanced by James Griffin’s evocative cover art and Michele McDannold’s careful editing, but it is Prahl’s voice that ultimately carries the collection: unflinching, graceful, and aflame with life.
While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
