In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking

by Frederick Speers

Frederick Speer's In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking invites the reader into an experience as wide, and as mystical, as the blue sky. The search for love, for the lover, for the self, for friends—the book makes what is universal incredibly individual and incredibly compelling, like all good mystic expression, and does so through a unique and innovative form that challenges the reader to stop, ponder, and discover its unique rhythm. There’s thunder, there’s the sweet relief of gentle rain, there’s the Good making faces in the clouds. For a book inspired by the calendar of a year, In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking expresses a deep urge to create its own structure, its own intuitive sense of time, and inspires in readers just the same sweet realization of how to make a life: “if it is to mean / anything in the thrilling / dark, it must be, / my friends, / that this desire, / unloosed, will be, / you, you...”

Genres: Poetry

22 pages, ebook

First published May 10, 2021

Reviews

[Suchita Senthil Kumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

First of, I think it's absolutely clever that a book titled 'In The Year of Our Making and Unmaking' is filled with calendar poems (if I could call them that). Also, each poem is titled after a month like: Receptive Month, Thin-Skinned Month, Month Refusing to Play the Field and so on. Like how every month of a calendar spills into the next, I felt like these poems were all somehow leading onto the next because I simply couldn't take a break when I began reading it. I'm sitting with these poems and going to be re-reading them because they seem to be giving me something new to take back each time.

[Judah Kosterman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twelve calendar-page-shaped poems and several bonus free verse pieces explore loving, losing, longing, and what we make with the rest of our lives. The calendar poems, where day entries are lines and weeks are stanzas, force an unusual, stuttered rhythm to the reading which makes one take note of individual and sometimes stunning word choices, such as in “Month Revisiting Old Haunts.” It can also lead to humor, such as in “Month for the Rest of my Life.” A chapbook worth spreading over a week of reading, to fully let these poems sink in.

[Isha G. K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful storytelling. My favourite poems were Month for the Rest of My Life and Exposed Month with Red & Yellow (SO GOOD)