Fixed Star

by Suzanne Frischkorn

The opening poem, "Cuban Polymita," from which the title Fixed Star arises, serves as the scaffolding device for Frischkorn's manuscript. Like the beautiful painted snails it references, the book, too, is a series of spirals: mainly, a pair of sonnet coronas whose recursive lines twine through the manuscript, both framing and bracing it. Navigating splits in language, geography, government, culture, and family-Frischkorn guides us through poems that are, contrapuntally, both luxuriant and lean. Swirling through this compact, honed manuscript is a series of citations (Shakespeare, John Cage, Muriel Rukeyser, John Keats, Normando Hernández González), and geographies (Cuba, Spain, Florida, Pennsylvania) that create transit across decades and differing terrains. Constellated with Latin jazz, jasper, sea glass, bougainvillea, contradanza, and coral reefs, Fixed Star is a brilliant treatise on violence, division, loss, longing, and the search for song.

―Simone Muench

Advance Praise

Elegant, clear-eyed, and restless, Suzanne Frischkorn's poems seek and illuminate the frayed hyphens fastening us to family, to the world. Her searching is psychologically rich, transformative: an iridescent interiority spirals outward to touch what sustains it, what divides it. Structurally brilliant, alive with lyrical thinking and observations, Fixed Star is ample proof of Frischkorn's poetic gifts. In her hands, language is light.

─Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

In Suzanne Frischkorn's intoxicating Fixed Star, content and form mirror and echo each other, twin and twine. From the opening line in the first of a sequence of sonnets that generates the book's architecture, "Birth cleaved me in half," we learn that the subject is separation, from first language, landscape, and heritage, a loss, a violence, a thievery carried by and negotiated within the body, which becomes, itself, a translation. So what, then, can poetry be? In Frischkorn's hands, it is-well-everything. It is the cry and the answering cry, the body's disappearance and revolution, history and tangled myth and the site of self-creation, honoring the fragments while languaging them into something greater, more songful than a whole. Much of the book's authority emerges from Frischkorn's formal virtuosity. And then there are the voices she braids into the poems. Transtromer and Plath. Keats and John Cage. Shakespeare and Olga Guillot. They are lyric companions on a perilous road that takes her to Lorca, from whom she learns that "Leaving is difficult. Sometimes / to stay, invites death." Fixed Star cannot be reduced to anything but itself. I am in genuine awe.

─Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2022

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

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What does it mean to disappear? / To lose the little sea inside you?" An intelligent, eloquent, original look at hyphenated American identity and an elegy to those lost little seas. As a hyphenated American myself, I could identify with many of the poems, such as "How Do You Say Orange?" where the narrator is only given a few words of her father's native language. A book about stolen language and identity, but also the beauty of heritage and landscape.

Full of gorgeous poetry such as:

"Oleander divides the highway like a rill, its blossoms spill their wan scent."
"...hope is forever caught in the almond tree."

Highly recommend.

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frischkorn’s Fixed Star is an attempt to excavate the movement from past to present to pinpoint the evolution, to understand something that was lost. In that adventure toward discovery, a restlessness propels each of these poems forward and back into the past again, signaling the push and the pull of who and what has birthed us to who and what we become.

Read the full review: https://savvyverseandwit.com/2022/11/...

[David Cazden · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems achieve an almost ideal balance between identity of self and ethnic identity. They are moving, restrained, patient. But lyrical, hot, passionate. Opens up a world of Cuban identity that is deep in the author's blood, a new world to most readers.

Wonderful use of Spanish language throughout, never too much, but always beautiful and in the right places. Also this is not just a collection of poems, the poems are arranged in a unique and careful way, to interrelate and connect.

This had to be be read more than once, as it is full of nuance. Suzanne Frischkorn has the ability to create great impact with a subtle nod or gesture of language, and one might miss it first time around. Can't recommend it enough for all readers of any genre.

[R.G. Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beauty and sadness braid together in these poems which explore the longing and emptiness of Cuban heritage displaced by exile. Anchored by two series of linked sonnets, Frischkorn’s book is rich in natural imagery as well as cultural snapshots that render both the speaker’s love and loss. How can one not be moved by lines such as these which close the sonnet “Tourist”?

…the scent of fear overcame

the stench of poverty. It touched her white skin.
A moment longer…it may not have rubbed off.

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Suzanne's poems will open your heart and mind to what it means to be from somewhere while being disconnected from the language of that place. Her poems explore the essential roles of language and place in understanding who we are. She is an honest poet without pretension.

[Tyler Julian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reviewed this collection online for THE SHORE. You can find that review here: https://www.theshorepoetry.org/shore-...

[Wendy Wisner · Rating 5 out of 5]

These gorgeous poems wrestle with identity, family, and history in lush poems that come alive on the page. I've admired Frischkorn's poems for a long time, and was blown away by this one.