Red Paper Flower

by Suzanne Frischkorn

chapbook

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Suzanne Frischkorn is a Cuban American poet and essayist. She is the author of Whipsaw (Anhinga Press 2024), winner of the 2025 CNY Book Award for Poetry, and a Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize finalist, Fixed Star (JackLeg Press), a Foreword INDIE Book of the Year finalist, Lit Windowpane, Girl on a Bridge, (both from Main Street Rag Press) and five chapbooks. Her poems and writing have recently appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Salamander, Verse Daily, Latino Poetry: A Library of America Anthology, The Nature of Our Times, (Paloma Press and Kent State University), and elsewhere. Her essays have been anthologized in A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers (Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics), and Poets' Poets (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025). She is the recipient of the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Writer’s Center for her book Lit Windowpane, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, a SWWIM Residency Award at The Betsy, and a 2025 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship. She is an editor for $ - Poetry is Currency and serves on the Terrain.org Editorial Board.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Red Paper Flower by Suzanne Frischkorn offers the reader textured layers of life on page. From back breaking first crush on font porch steps to The Woman Skinner of Wisconsin there is a range dissonance here that keeps you moving through the pages uncertain of what's ahead in the road.

Frischkorn is not shy about subject matter nor timid about exploratory form.
The First Signs unfolds like flower bud opening in sweetness until you realize the it fully open. Dick & Jane's Divorced Index is brilliant.

My personal favorites were Character Traits, The First Signs, and Bees.



There is wit, sadness, and the still of speechlessness all hung out together in this chapbook. If I had a criticism of this book, it would be that there is too little of it and I was left wanting much more.