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.
"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
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