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MAIDS
Please help me give back my stimulus check by reading Maids in support of www.domesticworkers.org and the rights, dignity, and health of domestic workers. In this overdue time of national reckoning, we all must offer the best we’ve got. My little book, Maids is the best I’ve got. In honor of the women who kept house for my parents when I was girl - a white doctor’s daughter in the 1960s and 70s - Maids opens “a lyric, vivid, scathingly honest window into the anatomy of prejudice and how it is built and inherited.” (Lauren Markham) For every copy of Maids you buy for $10.00 from Matter Press, I pledge to match that purchase price in a donation to the Coronavirus Care Fund at National Domestic Workers Alliance. I’ll post my donation receipts each month in hopes of donating $1,000 on the sale of 1o0 books. Just look for Maids at https://matterpress.com/maids/
Maids is the product of a decades-long reckoning Abby Frucht has been making with her thoughts and recollections about the women her parents hired to clean house when she was a girl – a doctor’s daughter – on Long Island in the 1960s and 70s. These prose poems' deliberately rocky language grapples, for instance, with the many hours the author passed at age ten with Cynthia from St Vincent and the Grenadines, who was fired for crying because she missed her own daughter, Abby’s same age, 2049 miles away. Maids was a finalist or semi-finalist for the Robert C. Jones Short Prose Book Prize, the Slope Editions Book Prize, the Marie Alexander Poetry Series, the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, and the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize.
Here is some advance praise for Maids:
"A lyric, vivid, scathingly honest window into the anatomy of prejudice and how it is built and inherited --one that sticks with you for long after the book has ended." Lauren Markham, author of The Faraway Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life
Oh my God is the only way to begin this blurb for the always amazing Abby Frucht’s stunningly inventive collection of gorgeous prose poems that read like connected short stories. Frucht limns the life of a girlhood lived amidst female household help, along the way delving deeply into class, race and longing. Deeply moving, funny, (the wordplay is delicious), this isn’t just a book, it’s a downright event.” Caroline Leavitt, New York Times Bestselling author of Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow
Abby Frucht's prose poems, Maids, read like metastable stories flickering in and out of time, testing questions on race and class in a quivery narrative then and now. I loved the experience of reading and re-reading Maids for this new form of life they create on the page.” Sergio Troncoso, author of Crossing Borders:Personal Essays, and A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son
“Abby Frucht has written a beautiful, unsettling, intelligent work. In this extended prose poem, she disrupts the ordinary flow of words in order to reflect the continual process of rupturing and meaning-making that is the lived life. Out of the shards of language, a story coalesces around questions of race, class, and cultural appropriation. Maids is an original, deeply serious, suspenseful, and often funny work that brought to mind Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights. In other words, it's wonderful.” Molly McCloskey, author of Straying
Maids is the product of a decades-long reckoning Abby Frucht has been making with her thoughts and recollections about the women her parents hired to clean house when she was a girl – a doctor’s daughter – on Long Island in the 1960s and 70s. These prose poems' deliberately rocky language grapples, for instance, with the many hours the author passed at age ten with Cynthia from St Vincent and the Grenadines, who was fired for crying because she missed her own daughter, Abby’s same age, 2049 miles away. Maids was a finalist or semi-finalist for the Robert C. Jones Short Prose Book Prize, the Slope Editions Book Prize, the Marie Alexander Poetry Series, the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, and the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize.
Here is some advance praise for Maids:
"A lyric, vivid, scathingly honest window into the anatomy of prejudice and how it is built and inherited --one that sticks with you for long after the book has ended." Lauren Markham, author of The Faraway Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life
Oh my God is the only way to begin this blurb for the always amazing Abby Frucht’s stunningly inventive collection of gorgeous prose poems that read like connected short stories. Frucht limns the life of a girlhood lived amidst female household help, along the way delving deeply into class, race and longing. Deeply moving, funny, (the wordplay is delicious), this isn’t just a book, it’s a downright event.” Caroline Leavitt, New York Times Bestselling author of Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow
Abby Frucht's prose poems, Maids, read like metastable stories flickering in and out of time, testing questions on race and class in a quivery narrative then and now. I loved the experience of reading and re-reading Maids for this new form of life they create on the page.” Sergio Troncoso, author of Crossing Borders:Personal Essays, and A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son
“Abby Frucht has written a beautiful, unsettling, intelligent work. In this extended prose poem, she disrupts the ordinary flow of words in order to reflect the continual process of rupturing and meaning-making that is the lived life. Out of the shards of language, a story coalesces around questions of race, class, and cultural appropriation. Maids is an original, deeply serious, suspenseful, and often funny work that brought to mind Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights. In other words, it's wonderful.” Molly McCloskey, author of Straying
88 pages, Paperback
Published January 30, 2020
16 people want to read
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December 28, 2019
It's pretty much a given that I will enjoy anything written by Abby Frucht as I've admired her writing for a long time. This book definitely was up to my expectations - it's unique, presented in a totally new and intriguing way, and somehow both a challenging and simple read. Many of the moments are poignant, and will cause you to breathe in sharply for just a moment before you read on to see what happens next.
My only quibble? And it really is just mine. This book is marketed as poetry. I don't see it as poetry at all, not even prose poetry. I see it as a collection of flash memoir. The lack (or the use of) punctuation doesn't make it poetry. The lyrical turn of phrase doesn't make it poetry. These things exist in fiction and nonfiction too. I see it as experimental, I see it as literary, and I see it as flash memoir. And I do worry that someone who isn't familiar with Abby Frucht might pick up the book expecting more traditional poetry, and then be disappointed.
Don't be. Read it, no matter what it's called. I just call it fantastic.
My only quibble? And it really is just mine. This book is marketed as poetry. I don't see it as poetry at all, not even prose poetry. I see it as a collection of flash memoir. The lack (or the use of) punctuation doesn't make it poetry. The lyrical turn of phrase doesn't make it poetry. These things exist in fiction and nonfiction too. I see it as experimental, I see it as literary, and I see it as flash memoir. And I do worry that someone who isn't familiar with Abby Frucht might pick up the book expecting more traditional poetry, and then be disappointed.
Don't be. Read it, no matter what it's called. I just call it fantastic.
Displaying 1 of 1 review