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Whipsaw
Winner of the 2025 CNY Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize
The latest collection from award-winning Cuban American poet Suzanne Frischkorn, Whipsaw delves into the culture of violence in the United States, the Anthropocene, and family history. Poems of place and climate grief are braided with the harrowing experience of motherhood in the time of 'me too', police brutality, and mass shootings. Through lyric, erasure, and origin story Whipsaw bears witness in the age of anxiety. Along the way Frischkorn observes the forest, its ecology and its wildlife, as it transforms through the seasons. In lucid images and lyrical language she reveals the resilience of the natural world and reflects on the wisdom it has for humanity. Voice driven, defiant, elegiac in mood, yet not without hope: 'Do you remember the morning after the ice storm? / How the wind through the branches / sounded like the parting of bead curtains?' Throughout Whipsaw the wonders of the forest provide solace.
Advance Praise
"Suzanne Frischkorn writes with the grit and tenderness it takes for a woman to live and raise children in violent America. Peril is close at hand, but so too is the solace of forests and seasons. She gathers crystalline images, as after an ice storm, 'the branches/sounded like the parting of bead curtains.' But the cut of helicopter blades follows close by. Hers is a terrible and beautiful balancing act. She takes inspiration from Alice Notley, Keith Richards, the Bard—and most profoundly Gaston Bachelard who leads her into 'the great law of forest revery.' I treasure this book so rich in thought and feeling." - Alison Hawthorne Deming
"Suzanne Frischkorn's Whipsaw is an astonishing run through verdant and shattered forests, transcended one temporal dimension at a time. Everything we come to know, by breath and apparition, gives way to what we pull through it, make of it. Whether harp or clasp, song or quietude, dark horse or deer's leap, social burdens attend condolences and we sure ourselves with understory every entry a new bound. A sensational and deeply intense read, a scatter of sunrays cut through bird song great. This one cuts to the core, delivering stunning reveal. Must read!" - Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Finalist for the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize
The latest collection from award-winning Cuban American poet Suzanne Frischkorn, Whipsaw delves into the culture of violence in the United States, the Anthropocene, and family history. Poems of place and climate grief are braided with the harrowing experience of motherhood in the time of 'me too', police brutality, and mass shootings. Through lyric, erasure, and origin story Whipsaw bears witness in the age of anxiety. Along the way Frischkorn observes the forest, its ecology and its wildlife, as it transforms through the seasons. In lucid images and lyrical language she reveals the resilience of the natural world and reflects on the wisdom it has for humanity. Voice driven, defiant, elegiac in mood, yet not without hope: 'Do you remember the morning after the ice storm? / How the wind through the branches / sounded like the parting of bead curtains?' Throughout Whipsaw the wonders of the forest provide solace.
Advance Praise
"Suzanne Frischkorn writes with the grit and tenderness it takes for a woman to live and raise children in violent America. Peril is close at hand, but so too is the solace of forests and seasons. She gathers crystalline images, as after an ice storm, 'the branches/sounded like the parting of bead curtains.' But the cut of helicopter blades follows close by. Hers is a terrible and beautiful balancing act. She takes inspiration from Alice Notley, Keith Richards, the Bard—and most profoundly Gaston Bachelard who leads her into 'the great law of forest revery.' I treasure this book so rich in thought and feeling." - Alison Hawthorne Deming
"Suzanne Frischkorn's Whipsaw is an astonishing run through verdant and shattered forests, transcended one temporal dimension at a time. Everything we come to know, by breath and apparition, gives way to what we pull through it, make of it. Whether harp or clasp, song or quietude, dark horse or deer's leap, social burdens attend condolences and we sure ourselves with understory every entry a new bound. A sensational and deeply intense read, a scatter of sunrays cut through bird song great. This one cuts to the core, delivering stunning reveal. Must read!" - Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
- GenresPoetry
70 pages, Paperback
Published April 10, 2024
About the author
Suzanne Frischkorn
11 books84 followersSuzanne 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.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 2, 2024
It is hard to describe the transcendent experience I just had reading this book. I am a changed person. If I found out this book was just been written for me and me alone to discover I wouldn’t be surprised.
June 1, 2024
Suzanne's work shines in her latest book! We love Fixed Star and hope her readers stay with her on the journey. Her latest dives into family, society, self, and the refuge of nature.
April 2, 2024
Having read Suzanne Frischkorn’s other books of poetry I had built expectations for Whipsaw, and I was both gratified to find what I hoped was there and also surprised to see this book subverted those expectations in all the best ways possible. When you read this book for yourself, you will know what I am talking about.
When I sat down with Whipsaw, I put on some classical music, namely Mozart’s piano concertos, and I immediately slipped into an entirely new world. This book is the most interesting collection of pastoral poetry I have read in years, and its success lies within the innate ability to re-imagine the very notion of landscape imagery and still retain the very best of the pastoral concepts. With Whipsaw, Suzanne Frischkorn has created a parallel between so many worlds but holds tight to the very human need to remain connected with the land, and does it with brilliant conceits and super-human intuitive use of language.
Frischkorn holds to her role as a mother and echoes the need to teach her children how to navigate the world. As I read, I was reminded of the classical Greek myths involving the feminine and motherhood. There was Artemis and Demeter. There were daughters, too. But the book did not merely consist of warnings. There were reminders of the divine in each person and communion with the natural world. Within these pages were marvelous answers and beautiful questions.
I have favorite poems, but looking back two days to when I read it in its entirety, I am left with the simple reality that the entire book works as a single unit and not one single poem is less than any other. My favorite poems, “Dear America,” “Copse,” and “The Origin of My Hard Times in Idaho” stand out as merely catering to my aesthetic. Frischkorn’s voice is bright and energetic—straightforward in a way that excites me and manages to keep me in rapt attention the entire read. Even with an erasure poem at the center of the manuscript, the poet’s voice is unmistakable and in charge.
This book is fantastic and is a worthy purchase, but if you have any special interest in the pastoral, in the mother-daughter relationship dynamic, or in how you establish voice, then this book rates as essential. There is no way around this being one of the best books of poetry for 2024. Buy this book with confidence.
When I sat down with Whipsaw, I put on some classical music, namely Mozart’s piano concertos, and I immediately slipped into an entirely new world. This book is the most interesting collection of pastoral poetry I have read in years, and its success lies within the innate ability to re-imagine the very notion of landscape imagery and still retain the very best of the pastoral concepts. With Whipsaw, Suzanne Frischkorn has created a parallel between so many worlds but holds tight to the very human need to remain connected with the land, and does it with brilliant conceits and super-human intuitive use of language.
Frischkorn holds to her role as a mother and echoes the need to teach her children how to navigate the world. As I read, I was reminded of the classical Greek myths involving the feminine and motherhood. There was Artemis and Demeter. There were daughters, too. But the book did not merely consist of warnings. There were reminders of the divine in each person and communion with the natural world. Within these pages were marvelous answers and beautiful questions.
I have favorite poems, but looking back two days to when I read it in its entirety, I am left with the simple reality that the entire book works as a single unit and not one single poem is less than any other. My favorite poems, “Dear America,” “Copse,” and “The Origin of My Hard Times in Idaho” stand out as merely catering to my aesthetic. Frischkorn’s voice is bright and energetic—straightforward in a way that excites me and manages to keep me in rapt attention the entire read. Even with an erasure poem at the center of the manuscript, the poet’s voice is unmistakable and in charge.
This book is fantastic and is a worthy purchase, but if you have any special interest in the pastoral, in the mother-daughter relationship dynamic, or in how you establish voice, then this book rates as essential. There is no way around this being one of the best books of poetry for 2024. Buy this book with confidence.
May 23, 2024
This is a rich collection of poems reflecting on life—the poet’s and ours collectively as humans and as Americans in the tumultuous river of contemporary life. A brilliant follow up to Fixed Star.
August 23, 2024
Moving, thoughtful, and sonically gorgeous collection.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews