(Anhinga Press 2024)
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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
“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
“…Motherhood is a delicate balance, not being frozen by fear despite dangers, our current trajectory with global warming, protecting while modeling living fully, leaping. Sexual desire, one rabbit jumping over another during mating, fertility, and seasonal changes are tied to continuation, images of enduring the reader is relieved to find scattered throughout the collection. Part of that enduring includes no second guessing about severing oneself from deadwood relationships and dysfunctional patterns, cutting what we can of those to sawdust for some other use.
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…”
Fixed Star
(JackLeg Press, 2022)
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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
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
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, JackLeg Press Poetry Editor
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
“Frischkorn’s use of the sonnet crown throughout the book reminds us of her mastery of the craft…..” New Pages
“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
Suzanne Frischkorn 