A Fresh Start Will Put You On Your Way by Andie Francis

Surreal, madcap, and brilliant all at once, Andie Francis’s creative universe is lit like fireworks. Music and meaning collide, redouble, and dissolve in poems where “great lights give. And great lights light. And great lights light upon.” Welcome to a pyrotechnics of sound and sense, a wonder of imagination, reality, and myth. Francis reminds us that while the world is strange and inexplicable, the world of poetry offers us ways to resist and also to act. As she writes, “Here, hold out for more.”

–Jane Miller, May 2022

Andie Francis’s A Fresh Start Will Put You on Your Way is a book of beginnings in the same way every life is a life of beginnings—each of us is each of us from one day to the next, but each instant of time is new, and in its combination of events unrepeatable. Here, narratives build from poem to poem, but no single narrative consumes the book, and at the end of the book, with the remarkable long poem, “A Genesis,” Francis collapses all narratives to their single beginning. This is a book capacious enough to withstand the collapse “in and to existence.”

–Shane McCrae