Gloria Frym

This recommendation could easily start with, "In the Rabbinical tradition of John Cage...," but it won't. Frym's poems are letters by design and device but pure cutting verse in image and breath. Frym is creating and burning originality and emotion, tradition and defiance.

There's both politic and eulogy in every movement, joy and disgust in the layering and shifting of forms. Poets both young and old could learn the possibilities and power of verse from Gloria Frym. Each refrain becomes a philosophy of the body as history, and history as the cultural, racial, and feminine wound it is.

I know I'm piling on generalities, but the spectrum of language, intelligence, and fire going on within Homeless at Home is so humbling I could go on for weeks. Her rhetoric is smart and funny, her juxtaposition startling and insightful. Her poems are meditations on mortality and death, and the life often lost and muddy that leads to it. Really, an amazing volume of poetry from one of San Francisco's most kick-ass poets.… (more)