The Burning Key is a testament to the communities and legacies that sustain intimate relationships and bridge intergenerational social movements. A student and teacher of history, Gates's literary legacy lies in her unflinching awareness that brings wounds to surface and violence to account, commemorating necessary truths with clear-eyed accuracy as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Featuring new work, poetry from limited editions, and selections from previously published books selected by the author, The Burning Key is a meditation on hope as resistance. Publisher's Weekly has hailed Gates as an artist that, "[T]akes seriously both the daily news with its constant abuses of power, and art's power to create news that stays news." "Like witnessing a holy physics, this collection grabs our greatest potentials of mind, soul, and revolutionary praxis. Gates' talent for motion through convergence makes all phenomena music. You will exit this collection transformed." -Tongo Eisen-Martin " 'Disturbance, are you my valentine?' asks Beatrix Gates at the outset of The Burning Key , her collected poems representing fifty years of provocative and prodigious work. In sui generis waves of imagistic associations, Gates unpacks this core question through surrealism and fantastical portraitures, prosodic comic tragedies, or lyrical poems of love and loss. Above all, hope wafts. Gates's The Burning Key delivers not a retrospective body of work, but a collection that is at once ominous and formidable. Each poem is as defiant of time as it is of "valentine's" ferment, key to desire." -Rosa Lane "Here, 'alder thickets clear, ' an eclipse turns everything red, and 'the evidence of flowers' proliferates. In The Burning Key , Beatrix Gates stays close to the moments when planetary, relational logics dissipate, re-constellating in ways we could not have imagined and did not: 'the big darkening green head' of a dying horse, or -- what it is 'to see more and to see less' as an on-going mode of survivance. As Gates writes: 'The veins carried the information.' Sometimes the information is a question, sometimes it's a face. This is a collection written close to life, mouth to the poem, 'listening/ to the end of dreaming and fighting to be heard.' " -Bhanu Kapil "The poise of these poems can't subdue the deep feeling in them. Gates, daughter and activist, teacher and friend, has adopted the casual, readable style of the New York School of poetry to recount visions and events from the late seventies on. The collection of poems is very helpful to a reader who wants to remember the actions, marches, people, jailings, and conversations at street level. This fine poetry lifts it all up and lets it fly again." -Fanny Howe Beatrix Gates has published six poetry collections, including Dos and Lambda Poetry Award Finalist, In the Open. She has been a fellow at MacDowell, Millay Arts, Monson Arts, the Huntington Library, Ucross, and VCCA, and she received a Maine Arts Commission Poetry Award. Her hybrid work appears in Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention. She shared NEA support, as librettist, for The Singing Bridge with composer Anna Dembska, and a Witter Bynner Translation Award with Electa Arenal for Jesús Aguado's The Poems of Vikram Babu. In 2021, "Close Apart: Beatrix Gates, poetry, & Tim Seabrook, etchings," spanning poems from 1973 to 2021, opened Word. Blue Hill Literary Arts Festival at the Cynthia Winings Gallery, and a documentary by Matt Shaw was commissioned on the collaboration with Anahata Foundation support. Gates founded Granite Press (1976-1989) in Penobscot, Maine, as a Book Artist, job printer and feminist small press publisher. She published Grace Paley's Leaning Forward, Joan Larkin's A Long Sound, the bilingual IXOK AMAR.GO, Central American Women Poets for Peace and letterpress editions by Rosa Lane and Jean Valentine. She has taught writing for 25 years in graduate and undergraduate programs, including City College of New York, Colby College, MFA programs at Goddard and NYU, and in many rural and urban community settings. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and BA from Antioch College. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has had significant time in NYC and San Francisco. She lives in Maine.