The big event in poetry for 2015 will likely be the long-awaited
resurrection of Frank Stanford."NPR.org
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
What About This
introduces to a broader audience an important
and original American poet sensitive, death-haunted, surreal,
carnal, dirt-flecked and deeply Southern whose promise, only
partly fulfilled, it hurts to contemplate. His poems flick on a
heretofore unnoticed porch light in your mind.”Dwight Garner,
The New York Times
* ”Stanford fearlessly explored the terror and wonder of the mind
and the physical world.”Publishers Weekly, starred review
* "Highly recommended work from an American original."Library
Journal, starred review
What About This marks a rare moment, when a critical and
completely original American voice is recovered after decades and
takes its rightful place in the canon
Now that the work is
finally available, the real risk is that Stanford’s poetic legacy
will play second fiddle to the myth of his life and death. The
beautiful young suicide is a hard narrative to shake
.What About
This offers the fullness of both the work and the image, and
leaves it to readers to decide what they will value most.”Jay
Deshpande, The New Republic
"This vibrant volume forms a comprehensive selection from his
huge output, and includes published and unpublished poetry and
prose, archival photographs, original manuscripts, a rejection
letter, an interview, and excerpts from the 'ungovernable'
fifteen-thousand-line epic poem, 'The Battlefield Where the Moon
Says I Love You'...Stanford’s poems are by turns earthly and
visionary."The New Yorker
The big event in poetry for 2015 will likely be the long-awaited
resurrection of Frank Stanford, a legendary badass from Arkansas,
much of whose poetry has been unavailable since his suicide at
the age of 29 in 1978
Stanford was a hell of a metaphor-maker
and simile-slinger, and could cast a spell of extreme intensity
with a flick of his wrist.”NPR.org
"The book [What About This], layered with north Delta dialect and
superstition, departs again and again on dream-like thought
sequences in which unpredictable imagery continually startles the
imagination and overwhelms it with visceral beauty."Matthew
Henricksen, Arkansas Times
Frank Stanford's What About This is a monumental achievement. So
much of Stanford's work was unpublished, scattered about in
limited-edition, hard-to-find volumes, but now it has been
collected and readers will rejoice to discover (or rediscover) a
distinct poetic voice
. He was a voracious reader and was heavily
influenced by Thomas Merton and French writers. He loved the
Surrealists and Rimbaud, Mallarme, Follain and the French
filmmakers Cocteau and Buñuel. His poetry is wildly imagistic,
imbued with Southern folklore and culture, and it'sto use
Stanford's own wordstrange.’"Tom Lavoie, Shelf Awareness
"Stanford was a teenage prodigy out of Arkansas bleeding
beautiful streams of Faulkner-like fever dream that has survived
mostly in out-of-print chapbooks passed hand-to-hand. Now a
monster compilation, 'What About This: Collected Poems of Frank
Stanford,' has assembled more than 700 pages of poetry and a
little prose like a moon-spattered Bible."Dean Kuipers, Los
Angeles Times
"The work of poet Frank Stanford, whose turbulent life ended in
suicide, is experiencing a well-deserved renaissance."Mary Ann
Gwinn, Seattle Times
"I don't believe in tame poetry. . . . Poetry busts guts."Frank
Stanford
As Dean Young writes in the Foreword to the book: "Many of these
poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood
in river mud... Frank Stanford, demonically prolific, approaches
the poem not as an exercise of rhetoric or a puzzle of signifiers
but as a man 'looking for his own tongue' in a -fight with a
ghost."