Fixed Star

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