The Body the Rooms - Andy Frazee

Praise for The Body, The Rooms

In the precise peregrinations of Andy Frazee's first book, what is at stake is nothing less than what it means to write lyric poetry now thrown into conflict with itself as it has been by the hallmarks of our cultural moment: irony ("irony beyond irony"), hyper-self-awareness, the constant interruptions of calamity far and near. In The Body, The Rooms, Frazee manages to turn self-consciousness into a virtue—into the lyric material itself. "Do we believe in anything" a poem asks—without a question mark. Even grief comes to us mediated, and so Frazee invents an elegy for the twenty-first century. Formally daring and beautifully written, this book braves its own questioning—and triumphs.

~ DONNA STONECIPHER

Andy Frazee's first book of poems re-imagines the limits of verse, traversing the landscape of the line from one horizon to another as he invests equally in the book's sonic impact as he does our visual reception of the work. Frazee approaches the collection as a space which is alternately closed and open, lyric and rash. His experimentations take this book into a poetic territory inhabited by writers such as Claudia Rankine, who illustrates the word as a means to complicate the collision between image, sound, and utterance. His craft is matched only by his illustrative manipulation of text which seems in many ways to transcend language, as well as subject. This work will prove to be a substantial contribution to a modern poetics which tests the boundaries of experimentation and our expectations of the poem in a contemporary world.

~ RUTH ELLEN KOCHER