Frayed escort, Karen Garthe Winner of the 2005 Colorado Prize for Poetry Final judge, Calvin Bedient Order this book: 1-800-627-7377 Buy this book! “Frayed escort puts a speedboat motor in the avant of avant-garde and immediately enters strange waters. Evading every opportunity to be obvious and tedious, the poetry somehow skips beyond even the need to be subtle: it is simply un­imaginably imaginative at every point. The writing is at once lean and fantastic, crisp and mobile. All but exclusively, it exhibits, rather than thematizes, freedom—light-footed, dance-footed, sure-footed freedom.” —Cal Bedient, final judge and author of The Violence of the Morning and Candy Necklace

"Everything in Frayed escort resists the normative; the poems catapult the reader into an off-kilter arena of sensations. Garthe’s terrific feat is in giving us deep feeling by way of the particularities: these poems of great empathy bring dread, suspicion, lament, disdain, and generosity to the fore in our reading of them. A struggle with faith, disbelief, sacrifice and terrible disaster haunts the collection, from its opening image of a plane-crash victim stuck in a tree through myriad snows (ash) and key Egyptian, Roman Catholic, and Buddhist figures. This is a wholly unique book."

—Susan Wheeler, author of Record Palace and Ledger
 
Karen Garthe's poetry has appeared in Fence, Volt, New American Writing, Chicago Review, and Colorado Review. She lives and works in New York City.