Far and Away by Frank Light

Like the way “everything snaps into place and holds high noon until the sun teeters and those under it pick up where they left off,” Frank Light‘s new collection, “Far and Away” envelopes and carries the reader across physical and emotional landscapes with an insistent, visceral and incandescent glow that is both delicate and earthy. His work reflects the way in which both the mundane and the unfamiliar can become transcendent, and does so in poetry crackling with insight and the nuance inherent to the human experience across the boundaries of time, place, and circumstance.

–Wendy Elizabeth Gowins, Editor-in-Chief, Jelly Bucket Magazine

 

“Go long enough, from becomes to.” In Frank Light’s poems, characters run toward and away from others, their lives, and themselves. These are poems in which the act of searching takes precedence over finding as the characters we are introduced to face the push-pull of trust and vulnerability versus cynicism and aloofness. One admits, “Sometimes I think a person’s really getting through/ really speaking from himself and later/ I find that’s bullshit, too.” While there’s a lot to mull over in these provocative poems, there’s also a buoyancy that keeps the reader from sinking into melancholy. In the end, we see it’s the shared experiences and camaraderie that matter, and that, eventually, “Everything snaps into place and holds.”

–Bernadette Geyer, author of The Scabbard of Her Throat and editor of My Cruel Invention: A Contemporary Poetry Anthology