Suzanne Frischkorn

_{Winner of the 2025 CNY Book Award for Poetry}

_{Finalist for the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize}

_{Purchase: Anhinga Press | Amazon}

Advance Praise

_{Suzanne Frischkorn writes with the grit and tenderness it takes for a woman to live and raise children in violent America. Peril is close at hand, but so too is the solace of forests and seasons. She gathers crystalline images, as after an ice storm, “the branches/sounded like the parting of bead curtains.” But the cut of helicopter blades follows close by. Hers is a terrible and beautiful balancing act. She takes inspiration from Alice Notley, Keith Richards, the Bard—and most profoundly Gaston Bachelard who leads her into “the great law of forest revery.” I treasure this book so rich in thought and feeling.} 

_{—Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of A Woven World}

_{Suzanne Frischkorn’s Whipsaw is an astonishing run through verdant and shattered forests, transcended one temporal dimension at a time. Everything we come to know, by breath and apparition, gives way to what we pull through it, make of it. Whether harp or clasp, song or quietude, dark horse or deer’s leap, social burdens attend condolences and we sure ourselves with understory every entry a new bound. A sensational and deeply intense read, a scatter of sunrays cut through bird song great. This one cuts to the core, delivering stunning reveal. Must read!}

_{—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, author of Look at This Blue}

Reviews

_{“Daughters and birdsong. Threat and hope. Intuition and resistance. Power.}

_{Suzanne Frischkorn’s Whipsaw is an extraordinary collection from an accomplished poet who deftly guides the reader through an America full of beauty and danger, an America all the more navigable thanks to these poems. Every poem is a kind of letter to America, intricately crafted, brazen and brilliant. Read this timely book before the election, then read it again for its timeless guidance, its lasting lyricism, its essential if cautious hope.” Terrain.org}

_{“…Bad things happen to girls and women in the forest, but not in these poems. “This is not a fairy tale.” Hurrah! Instead, the forest offers “detail of light and shade,” where our speaker takes solace among trees, and where “Like Thoreau alone // in the distant woods [she] come[s] to her[self]…. Here is a poet who fights for her freedom, protests “deforest, // to develop,” and strives to be the “kind / of mother— / to gift [her] child / endurance and steady pace…In Whipsaw, Suzanne Frischkorn uses language to cut in two ways—beyond the imperiled and “beyond the veil.” NewPages}

_{“Frischkorn’s presentation of the universe’s balance between light and dark, nature and civilization, good and evil, mother and child, throughout Whipsaw is at once striking and delicate. Frischkorn renders these truths in each poem, carrying the narrative arc deftly across each section and presenting the reader with an almost meditative treatise on what it means to be human in a world so often wrought with destruction, calamity, and bad news coming through our screens at every turn.…These are poems of survival and risk, of finding balance in a society that often seems as though it thrives on chaos.” RHINO}

_{“The beautiful scope of this book makes every poem belong to the whole … Suzanne Frischkorn uses myth and metaphor and the movement of seasons to give us this deeply satisfying volume of poetry. Fixed Star was a hard act to follow, but Whipsaw may be Frischkorn’s best work yet.” South Florida Poetry Journal}

_{“Enter a forest of poems when you open Suzanne Frischkorn’s Whipsaw, the poems given time and space to be themselves, take the shapes they need to take, something requiring incredible patience along with letting go. Distinct, tonally shifted by changes in light and season, the poems you’ll hear and gaze upon are spare, nothing excessive, appear effortless, comprising a space where we find ourselves…” MER Literary}

Fixed Star

_{(JackLeg Press, 2022)}

_{2022 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Finalist}

_{Purchase: Bookshop | Amazon}

Advance Praise

_{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, 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…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….Fixed Star cannot be reduced to anything but itself. I am in genuine awe.}  

_{─Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize}

<sub>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</sub>

Overview

_{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—”My father’s from Cuba. I’m American. /He wanted me to learn one language really well”—Frischkorn guides us through poems that are, contrapuntally, both luxuriant and lean. Swirling through this compact, honed manuscript are 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}

Reviews

_{“Fixed Star is beautiful and singular, telling a story often politicized and manipulated with nuance and personality. As Frischkorn’s speaker works through her personal family history, the reader also reckons with Cuban-US relations, the power of language to build bridges or create islands and the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves.” The Shore}

_{“Though “fixed star” suggests a distant but permanent guiding light, Suzanne Frischkorn plays against that by using assemblage, memory, and imagination to create the shifting Cuba that is hers through her father’s exiled family.” RHINO}

_{“….dualities play out throughout the entire collection, and Frischkorn adeptly weaves inside them images and metaphors that bring the poems back to a place of the self and its survival.” MER Literary}

_{“Frischkorn’s use of the sonnet crown throughout the book reminds us of her mastery of the craft…..” NewPages}

_{“There’s a deep restlessness in each of these poems as they deftly move from one to the next, ….and it is a skill to be admired.” Savvy Verse & Wit}

_{In Fixed Star, Suzanne Frischkorn uses sonnets and lyric poems to explore her relationship to Cuba, the home taken from her by a violent regime, leaving her with an ocean, a ruptured history, and echoes of a language she couldn’t reclaim.” Letras Latinas}