Frail-Craft

Yale Series of Younger Poets

by Jessica Fisher

Announcing the 2006 recipient of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets prize

Jessica Fisher’s Frail-Craft is winner of the 2006 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and judge Louise Glück’s fourth selection for the series. The book and the dream are the poet’s primary objects of investigation here. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, Fisher meditates on the problems and possibilities—the frail craft—of perception for the reader, the dreamer, maintaining that “if the eye can love—and it can, it does—then I held you and was held.” In her foreword to the book, Louise Glück writes that Fisher’s poetry is “haunting, elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery how plain-spoken it is. Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior. Fisher uses the sense this way, to observe how being is converted into thinking.”

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

This author page is for the third Jessica Fisher.

Authors named Jessica Fisher:

1. Jessica Fisher, author of Ben Solo: The Way Home
2. Jessica Fisher, mom/blogger/food enthusiast
3. Jessica Fisher, poetry
4. Jessica Fisher, one book about candida
5. Jessica Fisher, illustration and design

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a quiet book, meticulous, very careful. There are moments when some would call this metapoetry, but I don't think that would be accurate. Fisher seems to be playing not with the poem, but questioning the nature of English, its history, how we understand it. To say language, then, is the thrust of this book is also to sell it short. Isn't all poetry about language, ultimately, or shouldn't it be? She takes these issues as they come to investigate further, past language into meaning, past experience into memory, past memory into the self we create and hold. Eerily, these are poems I don't remember reading, which seem new every time, always positioning themselves, somehow, as other.

[beau · Rating 5 out of 5]

mmm. i like these a lot.

lots of good poems that I can't put here cause format forbids ("Song," "Stereography," others") - but here's one -

My Russian Lullaby
Jessica Fisher

That wolves sleep, though they hunger,
is little comfort. Snow falls on snow,
furious for white, still it is the craving
that marks you, you are not numb
but stunned by sorrow, every nook
and cranny of its shop of signs crammed full,
and sorrow is to you as the dog is to the bone:
worrying a dead thing, or a thing that wants
to be let alone, to sleep until the hunger passes

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely reflects the tastes of Louise Gluck (judge of the Yale contest)--if you like poems about dreams, or poems that aren't about dreams but seem like they are, you'll like this. The poems are best when they are particular and creepy, as when the speaker flays skin to "make you boots. .../ Why I thought you'd want these boots/ I don't know, unless as evidence that this body is yours still."

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

very good. very intricate, but very good.

[Allan Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cool, but not aloof, meditative without disengagement, the poems have dream qualities and, like dreams, unexpected turns. Involving and inventive in form and with an obvious intelligence, the work stretches the reader to keep up. It’s worth it. A quiet intensity pervades the writing, love amid it all.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novella is amazing.

[Jeremy · Rating 2 out of 5]

"June" / "The Wedding" / "Three Dreams" / "The Sermon" / "Song"

[Pie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hi Mom!

I loved this collection. I adore Jessica Fisher, I have ever since I saw her read at Literature Evening @ Bennington. She’s incredible. This is her debut collection, part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and I just loved every bit of this. “Love’s Vicissitudes” has a particular liveliness: “First you were hungry, then you were in love” it begins. Wow.

I need everything of hers now.

Love you so much, miss you tons.

Love,
Pie

[O. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressed by the first section--"love's vicissitudes" and the "nonsight" series, especially. The dream section & prose poems, less so but still worth a read. I covet her means of movement...

Really enamored by this:

"...Then you were in love.
Miraculous transformation, the path between
a labyrinth. Once you walk blinking
into the sudden sun, know the two will always
be twined. It is an outrage and you are outrageous
in your failure to distinguish between what ought
to be opposites, love and hatred, for example."

[SmarterLilac · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curious, but beautiful poems, though maybe not deserving of the lavish praise they've received. I enjoyed these subtle meditations, but sometimes found the supposedly flawless syntax awkward at times. They remind me of Whitman, A.R. Ammons, and the works of Brenda Hillman, who, not surprisingly, is on the dedication page as someone who helped with the collection.

Pretty, with an intriguingly erotic tint. That's about all I can write.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was an impressive debut collection. I liked the fairy tale like quality of many of the poems and the conversational voice. Also, the book contains many different types of poems including prose poems and one of these is a mini-novella.

[Luis Correa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A tumbling stream of images and fragmented dreams. While Fisher gives close attention to the language, imagination, and music of the poems, there is usually little grounding so the reader is left floating around in the ether. Intriguing, though, it deserves a closer second read.

[Julie Platt · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's an obvious intelligence at work here, but I found much of the language to be dull. Something tells me that this is the kind of book that will improve with multiple readings.

[Tia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Devin said, "I just read this really interesting collection of poems" (or something like that).
This intrigues me...I haven't read much poetry.
I liked it; Devin almost didn't get it back ;)

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ruined by prose poems and non-decisive shifts in form.

[Elisabeth · Rating 1 out of 5]

There are really only three poems in this book and they keep repeating themselves over and over. Truly a disappointment!

[Inverted · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find most of the poems opaque rather than ambiguous, disengaging than disclosing. I'm obsessed with musicality nowadays, and maybe the lack of it put me off.