The most telling artifact is usually in the garbage. • I give up on giving up. • When you’re lost you take everything as a sign. • A drunk ambushing a flock of birds. • Usually one must first be sick before one is brave. • Note to everybody: I’m leaving soon and so are you. • There is no amount of sleep or work that can turn ash back into wood. • When the stars come out I’m no longer alone. • Astrophysics: there is a rip in the center of space, and all this springing forth. • Only when I was completely drenched did I bother to smell the rain.
The most telling artifact is usually in the garbage. • I give up on giving up. • When you’re lost you take everything as a sign. • A drunk ambushing a flock of birds. • Usually one must first be sick before one is brave. • Note to everybody: I’m leaving soon and so are you. • There is no amount of sleep or work that can turn ash back into wood. • When the stars come out I’m no longer alone. • Astrophysics: there is a rip in the center of space, and all this springing forth. • Only when I was completely drenched did I bother to smell the rain.
Myths. Beasts & the Ways of Water reveals Clint Frakes as an bona fide literary descendent of his Beat generation mentors, such as Allen Ginsberg. Frakes has emerged as a luminous branch in that hallowed family tree, fusing mythological, contemplative, and humorous narrative and keen observation with compassionate urgency and spontaneity. These poems, written across the American west and Hawaii, shine as a diverse trove of classical and experimental forays from a true American heart.
“Clint Frakes combines connectedness of cyclical nature and engaged compassion with brush-back pitches designed to awaken slackened consciences, and he does it with alacrity.” —Paul Dresman
“Myths, Beasts & the Ways of Water is about seeking: sacred landscapes, love, myths to live with and by, elegies to poets. Somewhere at the intersection of all these journeys is baseball, which appears where sacred meets profane...Look around you, he says, it’s all sacred.” —Susan Schultz
“Clint Frakes’ poetry covers a wide range of subjects: pigeons arguing over spilled ramen on the sidewalk, oxygen exiting a cafe with a lovely woman, and the life cycle of sea turtles. His writing is expansive, good-humored, seemingly loosely and effortlessly knit—and rooted in keen observation. His knowledge is accented by a trickster’s irreverence, and fluency in mythological vocabularies that bring to light ancestral tracery of humankind’s first stories.” —Faye Kicknosway