About the Author

Frannie Lindsay is the winner of Red Hen Press's 2012 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award. Her previous books are Mayweed (The Word Works, 2010); Lamb (Perugia, 2006); and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press, 2005). Her awards include the May Swenson Award, the Perugia Award, the Washington Prize, and the Missouri Review Prize. Her work has been featured in Ted Kooser's column "American Life in Poetry," and on Writer's Almanac and Poetry Daily. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has received several Pushcart nominations. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Reviews

"Endlessly inventive and packed with small surprises, these poems turn the ordinary inside-out. Their quiet elegance belies their urgency, always underlying, and makes the language all the more powerful for its restraint. There's no extraneous decoration here, no prettifying or showing-off. The poet takes the world head on, moment by moment, with an intelligence and compassion that are fierce. This is a poet who deserves far greater recognition than she has received. She's among the very best of her generation, and Our Vanishing is one of the most honest, moving books I've read in years."
--Chase Twichell "It's rare to find a collection of poems driven and infused throughout by the abiding emotion of love--not youthful romantic love with its overwrought fevers and passions, but love of the quiet, everyday, persistent sort, among friends, within long partnerships, between humans and dogs--love of the kind that can grow almost invisible to us although it is foundational, essential, to our lives. Our Vanishing, in its profound compassion for all mortal creatures, makes such love visible again. Its poems are engaged not with themselves but with the world, working not through pyrotechnics, not through the 'look at me' of dazzle and shake, but rather through a precision so fine and absolute that the reader's desire for anything more falls away. This is the more, the poems assert, and they are not only correct but also entirely, convincingly, heartbreakingly true."
--Katharine Coles "With precise and surprising language, Frannie Lindsay has accomplished something very rare. The poems of Our Vanishing embody the music of Time: the joys, the loss, the passings--all the hard-won truths of living in this particular world. These are not poems that will try to change your life. These are poems that will live with you, will make you feel not so alone."
--Kevin Goodan "Frannie Lindsay, in her radiant new collection, is a modern-day Simone Weil, feisty and courageous in her pleadings with God on behalf of the dying, the near dying, the destitute, and all the rest of us waywards. To talk to God in such a manner as Lindsay does takes guts and she knows it, 'It is a sin talking this way to God, ' she writes. Such courage is born out of conviction, out of desperation. God is in this world, but not for all of us. To an eleven-year-old girl, Lindsay states, 'and there is your gaze which God has yet/to enter.' A female Saint Francis, Lindsay parades an astonishing procession of spirit guides throughout her collection: 'eight racing dogs, ' 'cider-bright foxes, ' 'gray lambs, ' 'squirrels, ' 'barn cats, ' 'therapy dogs, ' and 'a skunk leading her glamorous darlings.' Like all books tackling death, this collection is, in the end, not about death at all but about life: the incredible vibrancy of life and our fancy luck at being inside of it. This is a powerful collection from a greatly gifted, original voice."
--Cynthia Cruz