The Spokes of Venus

Magicians, wig makers, sculptors, perfumers, choreographers, and composers all help conjure the worlds of Frank's second collection, The Spokes of Venus. These poems offer a landscape shaped by the tensions between the act of making and the art of observing. If music and art are the sisters of poetry, this collection is a chorus-a glorious one-of siblings arguing and singing.

“"The gorgeously made poems in The Spokes of Venus suggest the self-reflexivity of the beholder and the nuances of perception: the slippage between object and viewer. The process of experiencing the world deeply, of venturing beyond the literal, beneath the surface, becomes a form of love in these brilliant meditations on process and creativity. Whether the object is painting or dance, installations or music, Frank's elegant, cerebral poems evoke all the senses in richly condensed lines: a syntax that fibrillates with radiant linguistic spokes-insights so fresh that that one can't help but be amazed and instructed: "A god can see something / that does not yet exist in the world." Rebecca Morgan Frank's poems have just that visionary freshness and strength: they share the power of all startlingly beautiful things."-Alice Fulton”

"Rebecca Morgan Frank's dazzling new collection leaps into the world of art making, inspired by the 19th century astronomer Percival Lowell's absurd insistence that he saw, through his own telescope, canals on the planet Venus-what he was seeing was the reflection of his own veinous eye! From this creative mistake, Frank moves into poems in conversations with artists living and dead, poems that turn us upside down and shake the reasonable dust of art history out of our pockets. They whirl into their subjects in an irresistible frenzy of language and music."--Gail Mazur (1/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)
"The gorgeously made poems in The Spokes of Venus suggest the self-reflexivity of the beholder and the nuances of perception: the slippage between object and viewer. The process of experiencing the world deeply, of venturing beyond the literal, beneath the surface, becomes a form of love in these brilliant meditations on process and creativity. Whether the object is painting or dance, installations or music, Frank's elegant, cerebral poems evoke all the senses in richly condensed lines: a syntax that fibrillates with radiant linguistic spokes--insights so fresh that that one can't help but be amazed and instructed: A god can see something / that does not yet exist in the world. Rebecca Morgan Frank's poems have just that visionary freshness and strength: they share the power of all startlingly beautiful things."--Alice Fulton (1/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)

REBECCA MORGAN FRANK'S first book, Little Murders Everywhere, was a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and she is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Ploughshares, Guernica, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Frank is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers.

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