Reviews
CAConrad’s voyeuresque surreal portrait of Frank includes apotheosis, rebirth, talking teapots and hats. It disrupts the landscape as “pins and/zippers of/other days/loosen.” CA is very good news as a raconteur, poet, performer and activist and makes news daily with his dedicated Outrider passion and “alternative path” imagination. Onward, as Bob Creeley would say.
—Anne Waldman
I can never have enough CAConrad, like paprika or wisdom in disguise.
Is he the Frank of the book?
—Bernadette Mayer
Dancing with a Kafka’s ghost, these poems move concretely as CAConrad’s protagonist “Frank” delights in the material word gone slightly mad—or is that actual and precise? The poems disturb, are über-real: horrific, magical, glistening. The questions? Frank persists in them, just is and answers back in an “imaginary vocabulary”.
—Hoa Nguyen
The title character in CAConrad’s The Book of Frank becomes an adult only after his mother dies, but even as a child he was prone to mystic visions. Now, he makes up movies in his head that people pay to watch from inside his body. He might as well be a poet. In his candid portrayal of human cruelty and its resultant fantasies of escape, CAConrad has written that rarest of poetry books—a gripping page-turner.
—Alan Gilbert
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