Frame Inside a Frame: Poems (Volume 37)

by Daniel Lassell

82 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2025

About the author

Daniel Lassell is the author of two poetry books: Frame Inside a Frame and Spit, winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Puerto del Sol, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. He grew up in Kentucky, where he raised llamas and alpacas.

Reviews

[Michael Luders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like forgotten clippings that fall from the flipped pages of a forgotten book, these new poems remind us of pasts, distant and warped by time. Reading them there is the insistence that everything might not be as we remember, that perhaps we frame our thoughts so we can tame them, so that they cannot overwhelm us—frame them, and then frame them again. Lassell asks us to reconsider the perspectives. The poems are ever searching, and in searching, therein the joy. We are treated to short verse, lean and direct, as in “Blueberry Muffin”: “The ink / stains my fingers // sugar crumbling / at my touch.” The finality reminds me of the great Japanese Death Poems. Imagery is paramount, “a new landscape // the way in carving a hilltop open / with a shovel’s knife-edge / the soil looks back / like a wound.” Nostalgia gains importance, too. In one poem, Lassell looks back on a tree, a shagbark hickory, and the pleasures it gave his brother and him in childhood. From its bark came the tools for swordplay, and its litter, the materials for fort-building. There is humor throughout, of course, but mostly there is the deadly seriousness of memory, a subject that cannot be plumbed enough. As Lassell says, “I look into puddles // and find in them / myself.” Look into these poems, they are magisterial.