Many of these poems honour the poet’s brother, who died of AIDS; his Spirit—in rhinestone tiara, crimson crepe de chine, and flamingo-pink pumps—is the muse of the book, watching over Foster’s shoulder as she explores and explodes the myths of our culture, the definitions in our dictionaries, and the categories of identity that define and confine us. Some of the poems revisit childhood, recalling a little boy who was "all toys and talk," observing that "boys will be boys/until dying makes them men." Other poems honour a friend who took her own life, revisiting "another of memory’s archeological digs/the strata of what we were." Throughout, Foster expresses a longing to rewrite the lives lost and to reread the world in the "brilliant blue pagination/of a summer sky." The book’s finale, "Drag Queen Rag: A Poem Caught in Several Definitive Acts," interlaces elegy, rant, drag show, and classical tragedy in a subversive performance that destabilizes gender, genre, and language itself, to open up a new space where it’s possible to reinvent the self.

Clarise Foster spent ten years living in the South Pacific. Her family moved to Guam when she was twelve, and she has since lived in Hawaii, Seattle, Vanvoucer, and, for the past eleven years, Winnipeg. The Flame Tree is Clarise’s first book.

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