The Plague of the Tender-Hearted by Cindy Frenkel

(1 customer review)

$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

 

 

Category:

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.

1 review for The Plague of the Tender-Hearted by Cindy Frenkel

  1. 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.

Add a review

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *