(JackLeg Press 2022)
Purchase: IndieBound | Bookshop | B&N | 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
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
In a time when there is no greater question than the question of environmental survival, Suzanne Frischkorn’s LIT WINDOWPANE reminds us of the necessity of unadorned and unapologetic praise for the natural world. In language spare and well-keeled, Frischkorn’s poems instill in the reader the kind of “perfect attentiveness” that the poet Alan Shapiro reminds us is required for reading and loving. Here, in these wonderful poems, we see that attentiveness devoted to the frail and meteoric world through a gaze that is both outward and inward.
–James Hoch
In the poem “Freshwater Notecards” Suzanne Frischkorn writes: “I will fly/ in like a bird: not looking/ sideways, not looking/ down, not looking up.” The imagination in these poems is like that; avid and disarming, they take the world head on, seeking beauty. In spare lines, with rich and lucid images, Suzanne Frischkorn sees the world transforming and remaking itself before her gaze. I love the elegant, heartfelt power of these poems.
–Cynthia Huntington
Good citizens beware: Suzanne Frischkorn has let Girl on a Bridge loose on the world and she’s spreading the word about the furies of femininity and the madness of motherhood with its “stone weight of home.” These poems burn holes on the fairy tale pages of domestic fantasy and uncover the treacherous (though more exciting) narratives of those women who dare stray from the path or, at the very least, who celebrate their desires: “What’s more flattering than being wanted by a mouth that waters?” This book of finely-crafted verse holds up its poetry like a lovely razor blade.
–Rigoberto González
Suzanne Frischkorn is a fierce and fearless poet. In Girl on a Bridge, she first upends our dainty notions of girlhood and then leads us into the wilderness of violence, madness, fear, and love — and does so with beauty and tenderness.
–Julianna Baggott
Suzanne Frischkorn’s poems are brisk and compelling. She writes as to a friend, or a stranger who might become a friend. The poems are extremely visual; the language is select and elegant, in the natural way a letter might reach elegance. The poem called Still Water begins “I want to tell you…”–a clear desire not only to express but to communicate. The poems are not home-spun by any means but exact, and exactly right, even at times beatific, so that we see what she sees as she sees it, which is pretty much, isn’t it, the poem’s intended accomplishment?
—Mary Oliver, Juror From the introduction to Spring Tide, winner of the 2004 Aldrich Poetry Award.
Eloquent, honest, Red Paper Flower, resonates with intelligence. Suzanne Frischkorn’s poems have a remarkable range of tone, they can be witty, tender, abrasive, but are always lucid, and tirelessly push beyond the surface of their subject matter. What I admire in this book is how each detail carries its emotional accuracy–what I love in these poems is their drive and pulse.
—Laure-Anne Bosselaar
The first chapbook in MiPOesias Cuban American Poetry Series. An earlier version of American Flamingo was named a finalist for the Philbrick Poetry Award.
Exhale, (Scandinavian Obliterati Press, 2000)
In poems sharp and honed as a stiletto, Suzanne Frischkorn creates out of rage and grief a world through which she saves herself. The book testifies to the resilience of the human spirit and it’s ability to love. The poems are clear, brilliant, and powerfully moving.
–Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Suzanne Frischkorn 