The Body, The Rooms
Selected by Ruth Ellen Kocher as the winner of the 2010 Subito Press Poetry Contest.
Find it at Small Press Distribution or Amazon.
“Andy Frazee’s first book of poems re-imagines the limits of verse, transversing the landscape of the line from one horizon to another as he invests equally in the book’s sonic impact as he does our visual reception of the work. Frazee approaches the collection as a space which is alternately closed and open, lyric and rash. His experimentations take this book into a poetic territory inhabited by writers such as Claudia Rankine, who illustrates the word as a means to complicate the collision among image, sound, and utterance. His craft is matched only by his illustrative manipulation of text which seems in many ways to transcend language, as well as subject. This work will prove to be a substantial contribution to a modern poetics which tests the boundaries of experimentation and our expectations of the poem in a contemporary world.”
Ruth Ellen Kocher
“In the precise peregrinations of Andy Frazee’s first book, what is at stake is nothing less than what it means to write lyric poetry now—thrown into conflict with itself as it has been by the hallmarks of our cultural moment: irony (“irony beyond irony”), hyper-self-awareness, the constant interruptions of calamity far and near. In The Body, The Rooms, Frazee manages to turn self-consciousness into a virtue—into the lyric material itself. “Do we believe in anything” a poem asks—without a question mark. Even grief comes to us mediated, and so Frazee invents an elegy for the twenty-first century. Formally daring and beautifully written, this book braves its own questioning—and triumphs.”
Donna Stonecipher
That The World Should Never Again Be Destroyed by Flood
Selected by Dan Peachy-Quick as the winner of the 2010 New American Press Chapbook Contest.
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“Formally innovative, emotionally resonant, Andy Frazee’s That the World Should Never Again Be Destroyed by Flood moves from allegory to lyric to shape-poem, and does so in such a way that the formal experiment of the work resolves into issues of grief and self and other and death in ways I wouldn’t have guessed at.”
Dan Beachy-Quick
