The Book of Frank

By CAConrad

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• Frank grew crows for hands
  
  it was a difficult childhood
  
  Praised by poet Anne Waldman as a “voyeuresque surreal portrait,” The Book of Frank is also, in the words of poet-critic Alan Gilbert, a “candid portrayal of human cruelty and its resultant fantasies of escape.” This is an expanded edition of CAConrad’s The Book of Frank, featuring additional “Frank” poems and an afterword by Eileen Myles.

• Conrad’s approach is a welcome change from high-minded poetry that steadfastly ignores the body in all its dumb, limiting materiality. Rimbaud declared that “I is another”; Conrad’s work shows us that the body itself is the first source of alienation and estrangement from the self, and is thus the true subject of poetry. Only by engaging this body, by forcing ourselves to travel through the shames and humiliations of its portals, can we achieve transport.
  Christopher Schmidt, Bookforum
       
  At once charming and frightening, The Book of Frank will certainly take the top of your head off, and it might just replace it with something better.
  Noah Eli Gordon, Boston Review
  
  The book offers provocative language and surprising subject matter throughout. The images are surreal, simple, startling and original... Frankly speaking, Mr. Conrad is a poet worth reading. Highly recommended.
  Charles Kruger, The Rumpus
  
  Conrad has created a intriguing book of poems, original, lucid and accessible in the best sense of the word. To read them is to enter into his world.
  Mary Wilson, MAKE Mag
  
  In The Book of Frank, CAConrad recasts this birth; he makes a cast of this birth; he casts a new son from it; like Warhol, he generates counterfeits and multiples; like Warhol, these images start to resemble one another, to enjoy a paradoxical life in and as Art that totally replaces the horizon line of conventional biology, temporality and experience.
  Joyelle McSweeney, Jacket2
  
  I…find that it takes risks. There are words in this book that speak to those who always find beauty within the filth. Just sit there…after reading, take a breath, and admire the beauty hidden within the words.
  Saku Egon Evon, Columbia Poetry Review
  
  
  

• CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books, 2024) AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021). The Book of Frank is now available in nine different languages. Other titles include While Standing in the Line for Death, ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tic for the Future Wilderness, and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. With Robert Dewhurst and Joshua Beckman, they co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. In 2022 Augusto Cascales made a film of their play The Obituary Show. They recently had their first solo exhibition at Fluent Gallery in Santander, Spain, titled 13 Moons: Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them online at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88.