Alias City

by Carol Frost

Welcome to Carol Frost's Alias City, which is, in the best sense of both words, the city of music. It is an orchestra wherein different turns of phrase, and syntactical wonders co-exist beautifully, to our delight. But it is also a great city of the mind. How so? The hero of this book is a refugee, a survivor of World War II. She is now losing her memory, trying to recount what happened, giving us brief glimpses into the darkness known as history ("I saw mothers of soldiers finding then losing in a crowd their still journeying sons") and the healing known as the natural world, of pigeons, doves, and the comic, ridiculous humans. Herein, she remembers the flight, the terror, and the cities torn in two, wherein "a photographer stood in the middle / of the street and with no right to the view / looked in the bedrooms and toilets." What does one see when one has lost memory, forgotten all the stories, yet still sees scraps of cities, of our lives: "Ridiculous, we. All the long, bright days. Days / without death, without without, the without. The suicide leap, comic as sex...All our acts become gestures of our acts. The litter of years/ has been, swept into another precinct." I am continuously amazed by the music Carol Frost has set this drama to. Amazed, and grateful for this chorus, and for this wisdom: "From no small rip in fate / the you you never shall be / more will be extracted."

—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

78 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2019

About the author

Carol Frost is the author of Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences (Tupelo Press, 2014). She teaches at Rollins College in Florida and spends summers in upstate New York.