Lit Windowpane

by Suzanne Frischkorn

Poetry

In a time when there is no greater question than the question of environmental survival, Suzanne Frischkorn's LIT WINDOWPANE reminds us of the necessity of unadorned and unapologetic praise for the natural world. In language spare and well-keeled, Frischkorn's poems instill in the reader the kind of "perfect attentiveness" that the poet Alan Shapiro reminds us is required for reading and loving. Here, in these wonderful poems, we see that attentiveness devoted to the frail and meteoric world through a gaze that is both outward and inward.

--James Hoch




In the poem "Freshwater Notecards" Suzanne Frischkorn writes: I will fly/ in like a bird: not looking/ sideways, not looking/ down, not looking up. The imagination in these poems is like that; avid and disarming, they take the world head on, seeking beauty. In spare lines, with rich and lucid images, Suzanne Frischkorn sees the world transforming and remaking itself before her gaze. I love the elegant, heartfelt power of these poems.

--Cynthia Huntington


From the introduction to Spring Tide, winner of the Aldrich Poetry Award

Suzanne Frischkorn's poems are brisk and compelling. She writes as to a friend, or a stranger who might become a friend. The poems are extremely visual; the language is select and elegant, in the natural way a letter might reach elegance. The poem called Still Water begins "I want to tell you…"--a clear desire not only to express but to communicate. The poems are not home-spun by any means but exact, and exactly right, even at times beatific, so that we see what she sees as she sees it, which is pretty much, isn't it, the poem's intended accomplishment?

--Mary Oliver

Genres: Poetry

47 pages, Paper

First published September 1, 2008

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

[Sandy Longhorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frischkorn writes fresh, short lyrics. Being a writer transfixed by place may be why I'm drawn to these poems, although they are not of "my" place (the Midwest). Frischkorn writes of New England and specifically of Connecticut. This is a wet world of rivers & ocean, rain & snow. In the opening poem, "Puccini at Dusk" the speaker confesses "I'll do anything / for beauty" and that sets the tone for the rest of the book.

"Watermark" is my favorite poem. It begins, "Valley of stars, lace, caulk, molten glass: / the glassine envelope of my womb; its water table rising." This poem is quite short, but packed with images and language that rolls off the tongue. The best poems in the book pack this kind of punch.

Another favorite is the litany poem "A Friend Asks, What's to Forgive?" Here is the opening, "Forgive me. I can't name the scarlet birds / that dart through the bramble." And the poem ends on this wonderful note, "And forgive the catmint, / the cosmos, and the black-eyed Susans, // for their tenacious grip on dry earth."

Frischkorn had me looking up several words as I read, which is always a delight. Here are the words I either learned or re-learned: tessellated, hyson, greisen, clerestory, noctilucent, and paean (re-learned that one!).

[Serena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Suzanne Frischkorn’s Lit Windowpane, published by small press Main Street Rag, is a slim collection of poems that examines what humanity has done to the environment and yet at the same time praises the unfettered beauty of nature. Like the men in the tavern of “The Mermaid Takes Issue With the Fable” (page 3), humans have “blackened” the Earth and “laughed” along the way as we’ve entertained ourselves without a single moment's pause about what our actions have caused -- and in some cases irreparably damaged.

Many of these poems are like gazing through a lit windowpane at the wildness of nature, watching it from afar and not interacting or obstructing it — enabling it to just be. Frischkorn’s lines are short, yet powerful in that readers immediately picture the scene and the action. Upon further reflection, they come to see the message beneath the lines — from preserving nature to decrying the harm that has come to nature at the hands of humanity.

Read full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2010/12/2...