Fire at the Big Top

The 80th anniversary of the circus fire looms / like burnt smoke over water. Now you are // both the boy and the girl and the only one / left to tell this story. So begins this collection of flaming poems that illuminates sexual love and lights up the circus. Yannone gives each performer a sonnet in a corona that includes the wire walker, the clown, the human cannonball, the bandleader. Before you've finished reading this page-turner, which is both a jeremiad and a joy, you'll even hear from the arsonist, himself, who intones, There is nothing on Earth I wouldn't want / To watch burn.

-Lillo Way, Flying: Trapeze Poems

An erotic circus of the glittering, gaudy, and heartbreaking, Fire at the Big Top is nothing short of electrifying. Yannone has crafted a subversive world of queer performance

and expression, where poems are crowns, matches, acrobats, clowns, knives, and rings and their leaping movements unfurl like colorful scarves or flaming swords. The most

intricate magic trick, this collection shows us how sex and love can turn the mundane into illusion and spectacle.

-Ansley Clark, Bloodline

Fire at the Big Top is a waxed-paraffin blaze of a read! A story of darling dare, wire walking, and combustion. A frenzy of love, destruction and tragedy in circus proportions.

-Catherine Ronan, Elemental Skin