25 Best L.A.-Centric Books Of 2025! “Fifty-eight writers come together in this new anthology to rise from the ashes of the January 2025 Los Angeles fires in Altadena and the Palisades. About a dozen writers in the collection lost their homes and there are some gut wrenching reflections on the unprecedented tragedy. There are also beautiful tributes to the many multigenerational Black Angelenos who have called Altadena home for over a century.” —L..A. Taco

“As the whole world watched, Los Angeles residents in late January and early February 2025 saw walls of fire rapidly descending on the city, their homes and their lives, propelled by winds of 100 miles an hour or more. The poems in this volume reach deep into this horrendous experience and at the same time help us rediscover our common humanity in the face of the socially generated ecological rupture that distinguishes our time. I found myself reading the poems in Catching Fire again and again, recognizing that what I was experiencing through the miracle of art was something historically universal, to be held onto and remembered: people caught in a “climate-crisis Pompei” as Susan Auerbach put it. The book ends with a call to rebuild. But the message is clear: what needs to be rebuilt are not simply the homes lost in Los Angeles but our entire social relation to the earth and to each other. Here there is hope.” —John Bellamy Foster, author, The Dialectics of Ecology

“I imagine that someday it will be possible to read these poems for literary merit. In the context of the irreplaceable cultural legacies that were burned, I make my own list of loss. In the context of friends out of their homes, I make a list of community pain. Poets Griffin and Modiano are practiced and talented curators of the written word. They've assembled a heartfelt collection of commemoration. These poems left a mark.” —K Shuck, 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita

“In this time of climate change and the apocalyptic weather events it can bring, we have moved beyond writing about its devastation—fires, floods, magna earthquakes—to write out of the experience itself. In Catching Fire: The Los Angeles Wildfires, poets who live where the flames consumed land, treasure and human life give us poems as powerful as the destruction they survived. But this anthology offers a different sort of power, raw and intimate. Art redeems the story, from this book’s cover image, in which the remains of a charred typewriter confronts us, to the final poem. I hope this book finds the vast readership it deserves.” —Margaret Randall, author, The Calendar’s Whim and Letters that Breathe Fire