Before the World Was On Fire, by Christine Potter

Poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

How do you navigate a world in flames? This chapbook says take a look backwards and consider how far you’ve come.

Before The World Was On Fire has a long and vivid memory. Christine Potter, also a young adult author, tells her own story in these poems. There are shout-outs to Margaret Hamilton and Lucille Ball, Amelia Earhart and Marie Curie, childhood role models—and in some cases anti-role models. This is a book about the great American suburbs, about growing up in a hopeful but somewhat repressed nation, a place that was at once wildly different and surprisingly not unlike today.

Potter’s family, very present here, were and are proud intellectuals and bohemians. Haunted by the Red Scare, her parents told her to never write anything down because it could be used against her. Too late for that now!

Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine, one of the original online lit mags. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Hole-in-the-Head Review, Kestrel, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and ONE ART. She is the author of the time traveling young adult series The Bean Books, and several other books of poetry. Her latest full-length collection of poems is Unforgetting, published by Kelsay Books. Christine lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and a spoiled kitty. Her house is haunted.