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  • Fixed Star

    (By Suzanne Frischkorn)

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    Author Suzanne Frischkorn
    “Book Descriptions: 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-Frischkorn guides us through poems that are, contrapuntally, both luxuriant and lean. Swirling through this compact, honed manuscript is 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

    Advance Praise

    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”

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