Words Make a Way Through Fire - by Cyra Sweet Dumitru (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

For readers in search of emotional and spiritual healing, a courageous, gripping memoir of one woman's journey of gradually healing her traumatized memory through poetry, swimming, and the intuited guidance of a spiritual presence named Voice.

Words Make a Way through Fire is an intimate, courageous memoir of a woman shattered by witnessing her eldest brother's horrific suicide when she was a teenager. The book traces her creative journey of recovery and healing with poetry as a constant companion.

The primary means of Cyra Dumitru's healing process, from age sixteen through adulthood, is writing poetry and journaling. During this decades-long journey, Cyra experiences a transcendent, loving presence called Voice who guides her and helps her imagine wholeness. She finds community with others through the sharing of poems. She studies poetry as craft and as medicine--becoming a published poet with multiple books, an award-winning college instructor of poetry writing, and a certified practitioner of poetic medicine who creates spaces where others can heal through poetry.

In Words Make a Way through Fire, Cyra explores the specific medicinal properties of poetry--giving order to interior anxiety, trusting the wisdom within--and invites her brother David to speak through her as he reflects upon his final hours. In doing so, poem by poem, she shifts gradually from being traumatized and feeling haunted to feeling empowered and spiritually expansive.

Review Quotes

"An elegiac and beautifully written work of poetry and prose."--Kirkus Reviews

"Cyra Dumitru has written with profound heart and soul for so many years, and this is her most crucial, personal work yet. With a voice that always illuminates, then heals, she offers her family's own difficult story with grace and love."--Naomi Shihab Nye, 2024 Wallace Stevens Award Winner for Lifetime Achievement, Academy of American Poetry

"When a gifted writer and poet can transform trauma into a triumphant healing of self and others, we can all celebrate! Thank you, Cyra, for helping us remember that, as in birth, so much good in life comes from suffering. And, we can emerge from the ashes of despair to deeper understanding of ourselves."--Alicia B. Bridgeland, PsyD, Clinical Psychologist

About the Author

Cyra Sweet Dumitru is a published poet and instructor of poetry, and one of four certified practitioners of poetic medicine in Texas. Her poems have appeared on the walls of City Hall, been spoken on national public radio and in museums, and appeared in city newspapers and national literary journals. Her collections of poems include What the Body Knows, Listening to Light, Remains, and Elder Moon. She offers therapeutic writing circles for adults learning to live with trauma, bereavement, depression, anxiety, and religious trauma. Cyra lives in San Antonio, Texas with her family.