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The Book of Frank
by CAConrad
2009
151 pages
Poetry
ISBN 9780925904 66 9
$16


the book of frank
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 

 

from The Book of Frank

Frank’s sister grew long blue feathers

she said it was worse than cutting teeth

she spent a month screaming in the cave
pushing them out

Frank would lie in bed at night
touching his own back

crying

praying it wouldn’t
come to him

but the day his sister flew to the house
he stood by the window in awe
giant blue spread coming in across the lake

he heard the hunter’s shot before she did

 


CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift.  He escaped to Philadelphia where he lives and writes with the PhillySound poets (www.PhillySound.blogspot.com).  He is the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX Press, 2008), The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2008), advanced ELVIS course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Press, 2009). 

He invites you to visit him online at www.CAConrad.blogspot.com

 

 

 

eoagh

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