Alchemist or Arsonist

Poems

Beth Gordon

A feminist poetry collection re-examining the figure of the crone and upending the patriarchal expectations she embodies.

In Alchemist or Arsonist, her second full-length collection, Beth Gordon supercharges the term crone, demonstrating in image-rich poems the magical strength of older women. The Crone is frank about the realities of aging—including plucking chin hairs—yet she also surprises, warning the reader: “The tiger has always been there. . . . She is right in front of you.” Taking afternoon shots of mescal and waiting in line for Mexican street corn, she contemplates Captcha pictures, AI, and tattoos.

The book expands its concerns in several long poems and sequences, encompassing the full range of human experience. “The Secret Fate of All Life,” a series of golden shovels based on quotes from the HBO show True Detective, moves into the surreal to represent language’s failure to describe the death of an infant, and how time can be displaced by grief. Other works explore the transformation that can come from tragedy, the perils of marriage and other relationships, and the complicated conversation older and younger versions of the self would have with each other.

Gordon’s candid, wry, uncompromising voice is both refreshing and bracing, and the poems perform alchemy as they set fire to traditional expectations. With an undercurrent of violence and murder, the book reveals the ultimate consequences of patriarchy. “Alchemist or arsonist: the end is the same,” The Crone tells us. “Something becomes something else.”

About the Author

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother, and grandmother in Asheville, North Carolina. She is the author of several chapbooks, including The Water Cycle, How to Keep Things Alive, Crone, and The First Day. Beth is managing editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, assistant editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salvé Books. She is on Instagram, Threads, and BlueSky @bethgordonpoet.

A white woman with short gray hair. She's wearing a purple T-shirt, has glasses on her head, and is sitting by a brick wall colored gray and pink

Photo Credit: John Dorroh

Praise for Alchemist or Arsonist

“Like a saddle stitch through a spellbook, the prose poem’s long line is a unifying force in Beth Gordon’s untamed & unerring second collection. Alchemist or Arsonist dips deftly to & fro between verse & prose (‘“Angels We Have Heard on High” + “Folsom Prison Blues” in equal measure’) to give its histories of scars, all rich with images, lists, & wisdom. (See how many &s it takes to span the breadth of Gordon’s achievement?) The voice in these poems is sinewy, strong—good meat, marbled & dark, ‘spellbound with murk & myth.’ Few books are both expansive & intimate enough to be a second skin. This one is.”
—Tom Snarsky, author of MOUNTEBANK

“Who is ‘the crone’ in Beth Gordon’s Alchemist or Arsonist? A deeply feeling, historied figure with magical associations—one who speaks with spiders, whose wants are ocean-large, who tangles her fingers into memory, desire, longing, the garden and side-car martinis, corner-slices of cake and murder documentaries. Who has lived. Who has flown. Who knows her teeth. Who invokes Hecate. Beth Gordon’s poems pull you into their life—their lives—with their nakedness, their fire, their wary tenderness, their skepticism of salvation. This collection glitters with a Promethean understanding of human life and experience; it takes the reader’s hand and runs with them ‘into the circle of mulberry trees like a bomb.’”
—Han VanderHart, author of Larks

“In Alchemist or Arsonist, invisibility becomes a form of magic. The crone—older woman, mother, diabolical lover, witness, witch—moves through a world where the boundaries between memory and prophecy dissolve. ‘Never put your hand near her teeth,’ she instructs. ‘Collect her dreams in a jar like fireflies.’ Aging and loss here are not endings; they are alchemical forces, catalysts for surreal transformation and freedom. ‘I was running through the grass,’ the crone tells us. ‘I was running into the circle of mulberry trees like a bomb.’ With its incantatory music and wild associative intelligence, Alchemist or Arsonist is a book about what happens when a woman stops asking to be seen and discovers instead the power of seeing. Beth Gordon is a poet of incredible imagination and she writes with an urgency, skill, and velocity I can only sit back and admire.”
—Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears