The Beatles' Second Album

A Sports Fan a Poet an Alcoholic and a Cherokee all walk into a bar in The Beatles Second Album by Franklin K.R. Cline and what are you doing? Youre getting ready to laugh. What you should be considering though is how quickly America can turn whoever you are and whatever you love into a punchline. Then youre in the unfortunate position of somehow trying to remind the country around you that underneath all of the prevailing and pre-conceived narratives about your multi-faceted identity you are still a human being capable of loneliness and love sonnets for Olivia and long hospital stays and a kind of meditative ambivalence about the big ugly nothingness of American mundanity. Franklin K.R. Cline succeeds in these poems at the difficult but much needed task of re-defining these identities into something complex nuanced singular and personal. If you finish this book and you dont recognize the humanness here then the jokes on you.-Ephraim Scott Sommers Author of Someone You Love Is Still Alive