Whipsaw

The latest collection from award-winning Cuban American poet Suzanne Frischkorn, Whipsaw delves into the culture of violence in the United States, the Anthropocene, and family history. Poems of place and climate grief are braided with the harrowing experience of motherhood in the time of 'me too', police brutality, and mass shootings. Through lyric, erasure, and origin story Whipsaw bears witness in the age of anxiety. Along the way Frischkorn observes the forest, its ecology and its wildlife, as it transforms through the seasons. In lucid images and lyrical language she reveals the resilience of the natural world and reflects on the wisdom it has for humanity. Voice driven, defiant, elegiac in mood, yet not without hope: 'Do you remember the morning after the ice storm? / How the wind through the branches / sounded like the parting of bead curtains?' Throughout Whipsaw the wonders of the forest provide solace.   Suzanne Frischkorn is a Cuban-American poet and essayist. She is the author of four poetry books including Whipsaw (Anhinga Press, 2024), Fixed Star ( JackLeg Press, 2022), Girl on a Bridge, Lit Windowpane (both from Main Street Rag Press), and five chapbooks. She's the recipient of The Writer's Center Emerging Writers Fellowship for her book Lit Windowpane, the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, and a 2023 SWWIM Residency Award at The Betsy. She is an editor at $ -Poetry Is Currency, and serves on the Terrain editorial board. She lived and wrote in Connecticut for many years and currently resides in New York.   "Suzanne Frischkorn writes with the grit and tenderness it takes for a woman to live and raise children in violent America. Peril is close at hand, but so too is the solace of forests and seasons. She gathers crystalline images, as after an ice storm, 'the branches/sounded like the parting of bead curtains.' But the cut of helicopter blades follows close by. Hers is a terrible and beautiful balancing act. She takes inspiration from Alice Notley, Keith Richards, the Bard—and most profoundly Gaston Bachelard who leads her into 'the great law of forest revery.' I treasure this book so rich in thought and feeling." - Alison Hawthorne Deming "Suzanne Frischkorn's Whipsaw is an astonishing run through verdant and shattered forests, transcended one temporal dimension at a time. Everything we come to know, by breath and apparition, gives way to what we pull through it, make of it. Whether harp or clasp, song or quietude, dark horse or deer's leap, social burdens attend condolences and we sure ourselves with understory every entry a new bound. A sensational and deeply intense read, a scatter of sunrays cut through bird song great. This one cuts to the core, delivering stunning reveal. Must read!" - Allison Adelle Hedge Coke