The Grief Manuscript by Frankie Rollins
$14.99
Here are remnants carried over from the surreal specificity of living in the threshold of loss. Rollins’ power lies not in getting over but in her attention while being in the midst. In fact, this is her invitation, her demand, and her gift. Open this book knowing you’ll be greeted by pain so pure as to border on the ecstatic. Expect, too, to be seared by immaculate images, ransacked by dexterous tonal range, and shorn to the bone by the wry sweep of grief written into, which is not to say explained. Each time I read The Grief Manuscript, I am wildly undone, genuinely grateful, and profoundly impressed.
–TC Tolbert
A proper diagnosis, that is to say, clarity, is only achieved when suffering has been properly examined. In the author’s expert hands, heartache can be catalogued into slides of “sore memories” and “cut-out wounds.” The “Grief Manuscript” chronicles a relationship’s built up symptoming, as the speaker sorts through attic boxes, photo albums, and remembered conversations. Frankie Karamazov Rollins deftly handles an accumulation of imagined, memoried and physical pain as it occurs across time. As slides of these moments are reviewed, the bacterial environs of grief are recreated, ultimately providing the speaker with clues to the way out of this “angled” pairing, and grief itself is confronted, lured to its final resting place.
–Annie Guthrie, author of The Good Dark
Grief is often such a fog of pain and confusion, but here Frankie Rollins slices, examines, and reveals it with poetic precision, letting us find pleasure in the discoveries. The Grief Manuscript is the work of a skilled feeler and observer, a fierce narrator who dives deep into an ending marriage to find her own wholeness, aided by a cast of remarkable characters who allow laughter to pierce the sorrow. For anyone who has ever loved and lost, this book will serve not as a voyeuristic relief, but an empathetic companion.
–Kimi Eisele, author of THE LIGHTEST OBJECT IN THE UNIVERSE
Description
The Grief Manuscript
by Frankie Rollins
$14.99, Flash Fiction, paper
978-1-64662-204-7
2020
Frankie Rollins is the author of a collection of fiction, The Sin Eater & Other Stories (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2013). Of this collection Publisher’s Weekly notes that “hauntingly beautiful language characterize[s] these stories, as ephemeral and indefinable as dreams.” Rollins published a novella, Doctor Porchiat’s Dream in Running Wild Novella Anthology, Volume 3 (2019), and work in Feminist Wire, Fairy Tale Review, and Conjunctions among others. She teaches honors and creative writing at Pima Community College in Tucson, AZ.
M.B. McLatchey –
In his Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky arrives at the stoic resolve that “To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.” Elizabeth Rollins’s The Grief Manuscript begins with this realization. We can only hurt the one we love, and the hurt in these pages is chronicled with such admirable restraint and yes, even humor, that we are reminded of what art does. Art searches through the rubble to find the “telling” pieces. Art summons our empathy for missteps that could have been our own. Art reminds us of our humanity by giving us tragedies, where the tragic hero refuses to be a puppet of the gods. Rollins’s The Grief Manuscript does all of these things. These are uplifting – and at times, bitingly humorous – pages that remind us of why we champion the tragic hero: because of the shining things that she finds in the rubble. A must read!