The Book of Frank

A visceral, surrealist tale of becoming, from the shamanic cult hero of contemporary queer poetry 
 
Beguiling, outrageous, playfully morbid and frequently stunning in its surreal flights of imagination, The Book of Frank follows the eponymous figure as he grows from his troubled childhood into an adult travesty of the ostensibly straight family man in a male-dominated world. Along the way, he navigates a series of darkly comic situations, commits acts of grotesque violence, loses his soul in the post and debates boundary lines with a pig. Frank is one of the great literary creations: a man who can declare that 'however we seek another's weakness is our tyranny', as often touchingly innocent as he is monstrously cruel. 
 
 Called 'a contemporary masterpiece' by Thurston Moore, a 'desert island book' by Anne Boyer and 'this generation's Dream Songs' by Maggie Nelson, The Book of Frank is one of the crucial poetic works of this century so far. Now, on the 30th anniversary of the first Frank poems' appearance, it is published in the UK for the first time.

I've heard it said that The Book of Frank is this generation's Dream Songs, but I think The Book of Frank surges ahead in experiment and lasting power

This is not merely a desert island book, but a book for a desert world. The Book of Frank lilts through the strangeness, brutality, and beauty of our often terrible age. These are unsparing poems, and it has been a gift to be sweetly wrecked by them again and again, never quite knowing whether to meet the mythic Frank with laughter or with tears

CAConrad's The Book of Frank enters like a Dixie tornado of nightmare surreality, the trash of USA demon seed consciousness assaulting the senses. CA's magic is his poetics, the transference of rotten hearts into crystal intellect, angel dreams, rhythms seeking love, and locating it in the essence of ritual and language. The Book of Frank is a contemporary masterpiece of radical prose in which the writer's soul sings across the page, rising above the indignities of Earthbound chaos, where humor and horror dance to the beat of the living dead

I can never have enough CAConrad, like paprika or wisdom in disguise. Is he the Frank of the book?

CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Book of Frank (2010), Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (2021) and the selected volume You Don’t Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis: And Other (Soma)tics (2023). They have received many grants and awards, including most recently the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. They regularly teach at Columbia University in New York City and at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.

And Other (Soma)tics

You Don't Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis

'A tremendous ball of fire hurled into the dark recesses of our world' Ocean Vuong 
'Radical . . . invites the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery' Tracy K. Smith 
'Psychotropic, visionary songs of love and defiance' Ralf Webb 
'Deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence' Eileen Myles 
'Queer . . . gorgeous . . . just stunning' Joelle Taylor 
 
A captivating, original call for creative freedom from one of the most singular poets of our time 
 
'this mechanistic world . . . has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry' 
 
Since their inception in 2005, CAConrad's (soma)tic poems have acted as an urgent appeal for an embodied, unfettered creative practice. Rooted in the Sanskrit 'soma', meaning 'to press and be newly born', and the Greek-derived 'somatic', relating to the body, Conrad's (soma)tic poetry reaches out from electrifying, esoteric rituals. Their methods are elaborate, and the results are unexpected: one, for instance, might begin by seeing the poet flood their body with the field calls of extinct animals - and end not only in a consideration of survivor's guilt and the destruction of ecosystems, but also in an elated sense of the presence, close at hand, of the many friends and lovers they lost to AIDS. 
 
Conrad draws on these rituals to enter a political, physical and spiritual state of consciousness, meditating on ecology, queerness and grief in powerful, dreamlike poetry that invites us to engage with the essence of things. This new selection is a testimony to poetry's capacity to reconnect us with the present moment and put an end to the alienation we feel: from our bodies, our surroundings, our planet.

CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious

In what is now the classic CAConrad mode of both exuberance and defiance, this book, like much of Conrad's epical body of work, is a tremendous ball of fire hurled into the dark recesses of our worlds (minds?). Luminous, sobering, but not without a capacious kindness in its ethos, this latest is a vibrant achievement from one of America's most legendary living poets

Conjured in the extreme present, this is a vital addition to the global poetry canon. Through a lifetime of devotion to craft, Conrad has achieved an inventive and astonishing collection: a haunting, a prayer, a connection. They show how the ancient technology of poetry is between all things, living and not. Queer and gorgeous, filled with grief and belonging, a body within a body. Just stunning. I am dumb-struck

CAConrad always argues (from the inside of their poems) for a poetry of radical inclusivity while keeping a very queer shoulder to the wheel. Their kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of their exposition, a kind of gigantism that seems to me to be most deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence

These are psychotropic, visionary songs of love and defiance. CA celebrates poetry as a connecting force, a spell-work which binds us to the earth, animals, stars, and one another

CAConrad's work is as tough and as vulnerable as our bodies, as intricate and blunt as a flattened copper penny or a lily of the valley or the nests we'd build if we were birds. There's a love poem here for Jim Brodey, who once talked about poems bursting apart with 'extreme gracious information'. Right? Gleaming like a mineral in the contemporary nightmare, that's what this book is made of: through and through

I've been a fan of CAConrad's work from the beginning. There is always a necessary and vital life force at work in this poetry. This is a wondrous and essential selection of their noble life project

At a time when I don't always know how to make sense of what's going on, CAConrad serves as a cleareyed seer

'this mechanistic world . . . has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry' 
 
Since their inception in 2005, CAConrad's (soma)tic poems have acted as an urgent appeal for an embodied, unfettered creative practice. Rooted in the Sanskrit 'soma', meaning 'to press and be newly born', and the Greek-derived 'somatic', relating to the body, Conrad's (soma)tic poetry reaches out from electrifying, esoteric rituals. Their methods are elaborate, and the results are unexpected: one, for instance, might begin by seeing the poet flood their body with the field calls of extinct animals - and end not only in a consideration of survivor's guilt and the destruction of ecosystems, but also in an elated sense of the presence, close at hand, of the many friends and lovers they lost to AIDS. 
 
Conrad draws on these rituals to enter a political, physical and spiritual state of consciousness, meditating on ecology, queerness and grief in powerful, dreamlike poetry that invites us to engage with the essence of things. This new selection is a testimony to poetry's capacity to reconnect us with the present moment and put an end to the alienation we feel: from our bodies, our surroundings, our planet.

CA Conrad

Books by CA Conrad

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