Cafe Crazy

by Francine Witte

Don’t be misled by the title of this book. Though a tomato may scream if you stab it, or the vicissitudes of domestic life lick your ankles below your TV tray like a lupine tongue, there is more method than madness to Francine Witte’s portrayal of how crazy interweaves with the mundane in this collection. Read through Café Crazy and see just how sure her hand is on the tiller. Life may be fractured, and experience treacherous to navigate, but these poems offer a regenerative and welcome cohesion, guiding us surely through the complex truths and misunderstandings of the Human Experience. This is a voice you can trust to tell the real story; her story-telling gifts are in full force in these poems. Welcome to Café Crazy—enter here, though the aperture of a poetic voice in full command of its faculties. –George Wallace, Writer in Residence, Walt Whitman Birthplace In Café Crazy, Francine Witte serves up tough, street-smart narrators and injects them with an incurable sense of wit while exercising the imagination to its legal limits. The essence of Witte’s work is sometimes dark, sometime playful, but always frighteningly addictive. –Meg Pokrass, author of The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down Francine Witte’s Cafe Crazy serves up a series of singed epiphanies, the burn out of not one, but two marriages, their ashy remains. “Not all fires burn the same,” the poet warns in the opening poem of this fine collection, and she’s right—yet each betrayal burns, each ending leaves scars. This parallel journey of doomed relationships, the poet’s and that of her parents’, explores how love “gets lost inside somewhere while you’re not paying attention.” Witte’s skill lies in her willingness to go deep, and to spare no one. She longs for love, “But love, like any bird, gets tired of flying and looks for a place to nest.” These brave poems rise like the phoenix from the ashes. These are the poems that pull you through. These are the poems that save you. –Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Enter Here; poetry editor, Cultural Weekly

80 pages, Paperback

Published December 20, 2017

Reviews

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had this dream in which the person who sawed me in half also doubled as my audience. I asked two people what the dream might mean, and both said the same thing. By the time I’d forgotten what both had said, I had finished Francine Witte’s Café Crazy. My heart had stopped. A ghost, I’m sure of it, was trying on a dress. The dream was unreachable and what I made of my unpopulated presence was that loneliness disappears twice. Since then, I’ve turned backward through the pages of this book that I might unhear my memory of applause and be, again, handless in the spirit of another’s missed immediacies. Witte’s writings are psalms of a return that with campfire and ash tell the familiar of a more recognizable exile.