"The book charts the speaker's growth from a terrifying evangelical girlhood in rural Indiana to a post-divorce re-envisioning of identity, love, and family in Vermont. . . . Whether or not the reader personally identifies with the deeply American story Breitland recounts, it is hard to resist her bracing feminist voice, and her vision of what is involved in the outer and inner work of change. I was left thinking about what growing up might yet require in my own life, different as it is. Likewise, it is impossible to finish this book unimpressed by the craft and intensity with which Breitland interweaves poems diverse in material and shape into a gorgeously unified whole."--Anne Myles, North American Review

"The motif of fire acts as a throughline in Breitland's work, stringing the poems together to form a collective whole. That recurring theme was inspired in part by a fire in Breitland's home a few years ago but also serves to reflect the burning of past events and their transformation through the healing process into an entirely new entity."--Alicia Wolfram, The Charlotte Observer

"Fire Index is an exploration beneath the many layers of truth, time, memory and so many other factors that is the stuff that sometimes makes life too hot to sit with." --Shanta Lee, final judge, author of GHETTOCLAUSTROPHBIA