What about This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

"The big event in poetry for 2015 will likely be the long-awaited resurrection of Frank Stanford."--NPR.org""What About This.".. introduces to a broader audience an important and original American poet -- sensitive, death-haunted, surreal, carnal, dirt-flecked and deeply Southern -- whose promise, o [...]
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"The big event in poetry for 2015 will likely be the long-awaited resurrection of Frank Stanford."--NPR.org""What About This.".. introduces to a broader audience an important and original American poet -- sensitive, death-haunted, surreal, carnal, dirt-flecked and deeply Southern -- whose promise, only partly fulfilled, it hurts to contemplate. His poems flick on a heretofore unnoticed porch light in your mind."--Dwight Garner, "The New York Times""*" "Stanford fearlessly explored the terror and wonder of the mind and the physical world."--"Publishers Weekly, " starred review"* ""Highly recommended work from an American original."--"Library Journal, "starred review"The big event in poetry for 2015 will likely be the long-awaited resurrection of Frank Stanford, a legendary badass from Arkansas, much of whose poetry has been unavailable since his suicide at the age of 29 in 1978... Stanford was a hell of a metaphor-maker and simile-slinger, and could cast a spell of extreme intensity with a flick of his wrist."--NPR.org"The book "What About This"], layered with north Delta dialect and superstition, departs again and again on dream-like thought sequences in which unpredictable imagery continually startles the imagination and overwhelms it with visceral beauty."--Matthew Henricksen, "Arkansas Times""Frank Stanford's "What About This" is a monumental achievement. So much of Stanford's work was unpublished, scattered about in limited-edition, hard-to-find volumes, but now it has been collected and readers will rejoice to discover (or rediscover) a distinct poetic voice.... He was a voracious reader and was heavily influenced by Thomas Merton and French writers. He loved the Surrealists and Rimbaud, Mallarme, Follain and the French filmmakers Cocteau and Bunuel. His poetry is wildly imagistic, imbued with Southern folklore and culture, and it's--to use Stanford's own word--'strange.'"--Tom Lavoie, "Shelf Awareness""I don't believe in tame poetry. . . . Poetry busts guts."--Frank Stanford"The" poetry publishing event of the season, this seven-hundred-plus page book highlights the arc of Frank Stanford's all-too-brief and incandescently brilliant career.Despite critical praise and near-mythic status as a poet, Frank Stanford's oeuvre has never fully been unified. The mystery and legend surrounding his life--and his suicide before the age of thirty--has made it nearly impossible to fully and accurately celebrate his body of work. Until now.This welcome and necessary volume includes hundreds of previously unpublished poems, a short story, an interview, and is richly illustrated with draft poems, photographs, and odd ephemera.As Dean Young writes in the Foreword to the book: "Many of these poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood in river mud... Frank Stanford, demonically prolific, approaches the poem not as an exercise of rhetoric or a puzzle of signifiers but as a man 'looking for his own tongue' in a knife-fight with a ghost."
Frank Stanford was born in Mississippi and worked as an unlicensed land surveyor. He published poetry, short fiction, and the epic 15,000-line poem "The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You." In June 1978, he died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.