About the 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
About the Author:
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.