Fixed Star

Finalist 2022 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award ??The opening poem Cuban Polymita from which the title Fixed Star arises serves as the scaffolding device for Frischkorn's manuscript. Like the beautiful painted snails it references the book too is a series of spirals: mainly a pair of sonnet coronas whose recursive lines twine through the manuscript both framing and bracing it. Navigating splits in language geography government culture and family-Frischkorn guides us through poems that are contrapuntally both luxuriant and lean. Swirling through this compact honed manuscript is a series of citations (Shakespeare John Cage Muriel Rukeyser John Keats Normando Hernández González) and geographies (Cuba Spain Florida Pennsylvania) that create transit across decades and differing terrains. Constellated with Latin jazz jasper sea glass bougainvillea contradanza and coral reefs Fixed Star is a brilliant treatise on violence division loss longing and the search for song. ?Simone Muench