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.
This book is Clint Frakes' first full volume of poetry includes poems written between 1987 and 2025 throughout the western United States and Hawaii. It is a diverse trove of elegies, imagist studies, dream sequences and experimental forays--with a wealth of lyrical attention to love and desire.
“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