Poem Fire: New and Selected Poems - Paperback

by Frank X. Gaspar (Author), Ellen Bass (Introduction by)

Spanning more than thirty years of work, Frank X. Gaspar's Poem Fire: New and Selected maps an American landscape suspended between the luminous and the familiar.

In a voice both bold and vulnerably intimate, these poems meditate on longing through an attention to the world's smallest gestures--an attention that is not mere sentimentality but an act of resistance against erasure and disappearance. Gaspar turns with equal care to overlooked lives: waitresses, truck drivers, travelers--figures encountered at the edges of intimacy, briefly illuminated in the midst of their routines. As Gaspar writes, "Lights winking among the shuffling cornstalks. And my lantern hissing. My loneliness was my own doing, but I didn't know."

"Frank Gaspar's poems are agile and forceful, their narratives clear and absorbing" (Mary Oliver), and are carried by a speaker unconfined by time yet anchored in the sublimity of the everyday. Including work from five previous collections, Poem Fire captures the quiet radiance of lived experience; this collection celebrates the life of a poet with a warm, keen eye.

Author Biography

Frank X. Gaspar was born and raised in Provincetown, Massachusetts, of Azorean Descent (Pico, Sao Miguel). He is the author of five collections of poetry, including Late Rapturous (Autumn House Press, 2012) and Night of a Thousand Blossoms (Alice James Books, 2004), named one of Library Journal's Best Poetry of 2004, and two novels. Among his many awards are multiple inclusions in Best American Poetry, four Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and a California Arts Council Fellowship in poetry. His debut novel, Leaving Pico, was a Barnes and Noble Discovery Prize winner, a recipient of the California Book Award for First Fiction, and a New York Times Notable Book. Currently, he teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Pacific University, Oregon, and lives in Long Beach, CA.