Frozen Charlotte: Poems

Available
4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
Bookshop.org has the highest-rated customer service of any bookstore in the world
Product Details
Price
$19.95  $18.55
Publisher
Able Muse Press
Publish Date
Pages
126
Dimensions
6.0 X 9.0 X 0.3 inches | 0.43 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781773490373

Earn by promoting books

Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.

Become an affiliate
About the Author
Susan de Sola's poems have appeared in many venues, such as the Hudson Review and PN Review, and in anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2018. She was a winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize and the Frost Farm Prize. She held a PhD in English from the Johns Hopkins University and had published essays and reviews as Susan de Sola Rodstein. Her photography was featured in the chapbook Little Blue Man. She was a faculty member at the West Chester Poetry Conference, and a featured poet at the 2020 Newburyport Literary Festival. A native New Yorker, she lived near Amsterdam with her family. She passed away in late 2021, only 59, after a short battle with cancer.
Reviews

[Frozen Charlotte] coruscates with light. Dip into the book, browse through it, or read it nonstop: you emerge with an after-image that's all color. . . . This poetry is active, more like video clips than snapshots. Even the static scenes suggest motion. . . . Humor flashes out of many of the poems. . . . With the economy and compression of the best poetry, de Sola does a lot with very few words. . . . Except that, more than color, it's light that shines through the collection. But the light isn't a glint or reflection that bounces off a surface; it's not a hard glare or a soft glow: de Sola has layered light inside the words.
--Deborah Warren, Literary Matters

Lucidity unites the book's poems, whether de Sola is training her attention on a pair of stockings, an umbrella ("an empty cup/ downturned/ to reroute// not gather") or a vase of tulips effortfully lifted out of the long shadow of Plath ("plush concavities/ which made of content an irrelevancy") . . . Although Frozen Charlotte often concerns itself with the wide gulfs between men and women, between past and present, between color and substance, [such] moments of empathy . . . remind us that bridges do exist.
--Jenna Le, Agni

Susan de Sola's Frozen Charlotte is a lyrical collection exploring a rich cultural and familial tapestry that spans continents and generations. Frozen Charlotte delivers tight poems that sing; whether elegies or odes, Susan de Sola reminds that life is full of loss, and gratitude and celebration go hand in hand with pain.
--Scott Whitaker, The Broadkill Review

...de Sola's is a "large" poetry in the best sense. It's also distinctive. When you're reading Frozen Charlotte, you're spending time with a unique sensibility, both personal and poetic. Even as de Sola keeps faith with many aspects of poetry's great tradition, she's also, in an unshowy way, an original.
--Daniel Brown, World Literature Today

Poetry is emotion put into measure," Thomas Hardy said. Susan de Sola (a contributor to the Arts Fuse) in her wide-ranging collection Frozen Charlotte excels in both of these domains. . . . In addition to weighty subjects, de Sola can be laugh out loud amusing. . . . In Frozen Charlotte, Susan de Sola provides readers with enough aesthetic pleasure and thoughtful commentary about today's world to remind us of just how good-and necessary-poetry can be.
--Ed Meek, The Arts Fuse

A Frozen Charlotte is not a dessert, and while that discovery dashed my gourmandish hopes, this book turns out to be a very tasty sampler indeed. By turns sweet, bitter, and the literary equivalent of umami, the poems within it range from straightforward, heartbreaking evocations of feeling and mood to extremely out-there wordplay to character studies to light verse. Not only the subject matter but the poetic technique changes from page to page, yet there is never a sense of difficulty for its own sake, nor does the book feel like a random jumble. . . . Let's get out of the way the fact that Susan de Sola is a masterful poet. She handles a range of forms seemingly without breaking a sweat. . . . This book will change with the light each time you read it. There is humor in the monumentally sad poems and pointed meaning in the funny ones. This rich, kaleidoscopic collection is better than any dessert.
--Barbara Egel, Light