Beatriz Hausner combines poetry and poetic prose, fiction and non-fiction and her own remarkable presence into a work of creative imagination. This book moves with cohesion and depth across a set of mysteries that have endured for over seventeen centuries.
It is both a science fiction/dystopian book about poetry, but also includes some classic poetry reimagined. It really is genre defying, and it is necessary to suspend your belief and open your mind while reading this one.
The subtitle of Who By Fire, “A Dame Polara Mystery,” might conjure in the reader’s mind a dowager member of the aristocracy solving crimes in a cozy manner across the English countryside, circa 1920. The hero of Greg Rhyno’s new novel is nothing like that, and the story is definitely not cozy.
Told through poetry, prose, conversations, and medical reports, this novel is an achronological assemblage, its structural innovation suggesting the messiness of pregnancy and early motherhood, the struggle to make sense of it as it happens.
© 2025| THE Miramichi Reader
