Fixed Star bookcover

Fixed Star

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Description

Finalist, 2022 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award


The opening poem, "Cuban Polymita," from which the title Fixed Star arises, serves as the scaffolding device for Frischkorn's manuscript. Like the beautiful painted snails it references, the book, too, is a series of spirals: mainly, a pair of sonnet coronas whose recursive lines twine through the manuscript, both framing and bracing it. Navigating splits in language, geography, government, culture, and family-Frischkorn guides us through poems that are, contrapuntally, both luxuriant and lean. Swirling through this compact, honed manuscript is a series of citations (Shakespeare, John Cage, Muriel Rukeyser, John Keats, Normando Hernández González), and geographies (Cuba, Spain, Florida, Pennsylvania) that create transit across decades and differing terrains. Constellated with Latin jazz, jasper, sea glass, bougainvillea, contradanza, and coral reefs, Fixed Star is a brilliant treatise on violence, division, loss, longing, and the search for song. Simone Muench


Product Details

PublisherJackleg Press
Publish DateSeptember 15, 2022
Pages72
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781737513476
Dimensions9.0 X 6.0 X 0.2 inches | 0.3 pounds
BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry

About the Author

Suzanne Frischkorn is a Cuban-American poet. In addition to Fixed Star, she is the author of Girl on a Bridge, Lit Windowpane, (both from Main Street Rag Press) and five chapbooks. She is the recipient of The Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Writer's Center for her book Lit Windowpane, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism. She is an Editor for $ -Poetry is Currency and serves on the Terrain.org Editorial Board.

Reviews

Elegant, clear-eyed, and restless, Suzanne Frischkorn's poems seek and illuminate the frayed hyphens fastening us to family, to the world. Her searching is psychologically rich, transformative: an iridescent interiority spirals outward to touch what sustains it, what divides it. Structurally brilliant, alive with lyrical thinking and observations, Fixed Star is ample proof of Frischkorn's poetic gifts. In her hands, language is light. ─Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

In Suzanne Frischkorn's intoxicating Fixed Star, content and form mirror and echo each other, twin and twine. From the opening line in the first of a sequence of sonnets that generates the book's architecture, "Birth cleaved me in half," we learn that the subject is separation, from first language, landscape, and heritage, a loss, a violence, a thievery carried by and negotiated within the body, which becomes, itself, a translation. So what, then, can poetry be? In Frischkorn's hands, it is-well-everything. It is the cry and the answering cry, the body's disappearance and revolution, history and tangled myth and the site of self-creation, honoring the fragments while languaging them into something greater, more songful than a whole. Much of the book's authority emerges from Frischkorn's formal virtuosity. And then there are the voices she braids into the poems. Transtromer and Plath. Keats and John Cage. Shakespeare and Olga Guillot. They are lyric companions on a perilous road that takes her to Lorca, from whom she learns that "Leaving is difficult. Sometimes / to stay, invites death." Fixed Star cannot be reduced to anything but itself. I am in genuine awe. ─Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

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