The Plague of the Tender-Hearted by Cindy Frenkel
$14.99
In The Plague of the Tender-Hearted, Cindy Frenkel makes her way through the maze of family death, divorce, even a brother’s suicide without ever losing the ability to embrace joys small and large. Despite heart-rending troubles there is still beauty in the natural world, the discovery of an unlikely new love, and moments with a beloved daughter when night “stars spill out, / enough to occupy the universe.”
–Mary Jo Firth Gillett
With her three-part alchemy of plain speaking, suddenly perfect metaphors, and explosive, morally anchored last lines, Cindy Frenkel portrays a family in The Plague of the Tender-Hearted. From the witty to the elegiac, the poems quest for the why beneath a brother’s suicide and examine the underside of prosperity. But the marvels of this collection are the sassy buoyant poems of love for a daughter and unexpected love after divorce. Frenkel uses memory, the dynamics of ageing parents, and the legacy of the Holocaust to pierce us with her bullseye poetic one-liners. The Plague of the Tender-Hearted, with its gem-like rhymes, is both an exploration and a revelation.
–Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems
Description
The Plague of the Tender-Hearted
by Cindy Frenkel
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-297-9
2020
Cindy Frenkel‘s essay “15 Lessons from 9 Years of Teaching” appeared in Writers in Education. Her essay “My Brother & Kate Spade” was in The Jewish News and her remembrance “Galway Kinnell and the Blue Button-Down,” was in The Southampton Review. She served as a Writer-in-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Project (iO), which brings working poets into Detroit public schools; her essay about that is in the anthology To Light a Fire. Her poetry has been in numerous journals, and her prose has appeared in publications ranging from Vanity Fair to The New York Observer, where she was a columnist. She co-authored 100 Essential Books for Jewish Readers with Rabbi Daniel B. Syme and was the writer/editor of the Detroit Institute of Arts magazine. She teaches literature and creative writing for video gamers at Lawrence Technological University. She has an M.F.A. from Columbia University and was a Hambidge fellow in 2018. For more information, please visit www.cindyfrenkel.com.
Linda Sienkiewicz –
An exceptional collection of poems dealing with hard subjects. Never maudlin or melodramatic, each word hits the right note, the right tone. For Frenkel, having grown up in a family where emotions were buried or dismissed, this is no small accomplishment. You’ll find much to relate to in these poems.