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The Dark Villages of Childhood
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by Dr. Stephen Frech
(2008)
24 pages
Cost: $8.00
S&H: $3.50
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About the book:
2008
Winner in the Mississippi
Valley Chapbook Contest
and 2011 Winner of the
Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award sponsored by the
New England Poetry Club. The prize is issued
to the best chapbook published in the US in
the previous two years. The New England
Poetry Club is located in Boston and was
founded in 1915 by Amy Lowell, Robert Frost,
and Conrad Aiken.
Reviews:
"Frech
is a poet of dark spaces: the mysterious,
dimly-lit memories of childhood and the
uncomfortable fear of falling into the
unknown as "light
spill[ing] like fine grain between cracks."
This poet walks a subtle tightrope between
nightmare and actuality, childhood and
adulthood, real and surreal, "desperate to
say a thing / for which there is no
language, only likeness."
-Kristin
Abraham
"Stephen Frech's great strength in The Dark
Villages of Childhood is not the elegant
metaphor, though he has some of these, but
the uncanny selection of mundane details
that startle by their rightness. In 'The
Ghost of Him,' a 10-part elegy for a
childhood friend who died young, Frech calls
upon every sense we own to evoke a boy's
world that is remarkably real and
unmistakably American. Don't let the 'dark'
in his title fool you: his images shimmer."
-Gary
Miranda
"Sweet childhood reminiscence and the dark
music of elegy are powerful co-presences in
Stephen Frech's lovely collection.
Underneath its clear surface run smart
strategic moves and deep emotional currents.
This book's a keeper! Read it once and it
will demand your company again and again."
-Albert Goldbarth
"There
is a constantly looking for things, and then
things appear as if out of a dream, as if a
flashlight is
shined upon them. And
then there are responses that are trying to
give us clues of who we were,
something we'd like to recognize again, over
long distances, big spaces of living."
-Sheri
Grutz
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