Sparked by a fascination with space and proximity, the four interwoven series in A Small Rising Up in the Lungs traverse literary topographies and human relationships to urge the speaker into physical and emotional proximity to the Other, at distances sometimes close and at other times unreachable.
The first full-length collection from Kit Frick, A Small Rising Up in the Lungs is an agile excavation, at once playful and pensive, inquest and act of empathy. From imagined landscapes and escape routes to the coal mines of western Pennsylvania, these poems construct a possible heritage through an exploration of the terrain we navigate—on foot and in our blood.
NEW AMERICAN PRESS // NOVEMBER 13, 2018
♦ Winner of the 2017 New American Poetry Prize, selected by judge Jesse Lee Kercheval
FROM A SMALL RISING UP IN THE LUNGS
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Kill Your Darlings, Clementine
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The men here sing only at night sing loss
sing puncture in the lungs tar in the lungs
sing when no one listens only sing into bottles then cork them
then release them to the river
In A Small Rising Up in the Lungs, language shimmers at the heart of all things. Kit Frick uses the page like a canvas, spacing words so the reader is made aware of both space and time. A Small Rising Up in the Lungs is a stunning meditation on the act of seeing, being, and this perilously fleeting thing we call life.
Wallace Stevens called it, “a curious puffing.” Kit Frick calls it, A Small Rising Up in the Lungs. Both speak to the modest, insistent, and inquisitive utterance that wants nothing less than to “unvex” the world. Frick maps the topography and digs into the cultural anthropology of our time. She uncovers a place inhabited by laconic, wanting, shuffling, axe-wielding, cruel, lonely men “sick with urgency” who “manufacture nostalgia” as they prepare for disaster. They want answers. They can’t abide laws. I recognize these men, don’t you? This uncanny, bright first book is a “minor adjustment” that calls for an exceedingly large revision to what we thought we knew.
In A Small Rising Up in the Lungs, Kit Frick journeys, over land and sea, through silence and doubt, the destination always receding further into the distance. Always, in these poems, Frick’s language is luminous and spare; here, danger shimmers beautifully just below the surface. “In this place we define things,” Frick writes, “in terms of absence,” and still these poems are insistent in their strength, in their presence.
If the term inspiration denotes both creative invigoration and the intake of breath, then Kit Frick’s poetry collection A Small Rising Up in the Lungs is a place where every line fills the reader with new fuel. In poems that feel at once contemporary and timeless, Frick teaches us to hold silence against our chest like a stunned wren, to place ourselves at the shore of real and imagined oceans, and to read passersby as a faint, familiar script. The poem “Arroyo” instructs us that, “In this place we define things. In terms of absence. No new / air. No saving grace. Our suspicion is: There are better ways / of understanding.” The pauses and absences in this collection grant us entry to the narrative, and allow us to breathe—and thrive—beneath its surface. This is a bright, mesmerizing debut, not to be missed.
What’s stunning about Kit Frick’s A Small Rising Up in the Lungs is how she develops not only a sense of place, but a sense of people in that place—a place and people who exist both in the fantasy of imagined landscape and the settled quiet of the everyday. The language stuns, too; her fragments allow for multiple meaning; she builds for us an opening. She writes, “our words can’t contain the bigness of rooms,” but even more than bigness, Frick’s words contain smallness—of the world, of the town, of the individual life. She brews a general sense of stasis, still but crushing, like the atmosphere on Venus. The book builds upon itself in layers that work like a pressure cooker, urging us to allow it to contain a little more, and a little more. Frick writes, “I ask // a lot // adore me anyway.” She does, and I do.
Kit Frick is a poet whose ear is tuned to the fine and particular. Her spare lines and muscular syntax build a troublesome dream of the American West that leaves us uneasily suspended between mystery and threat.
The manuscript was previously a finalist in the following contests:
The Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing, 2017) The National Poetry Series (2016) The Akron Poetry Prize (University of Akron Press, 2016 & 2015) The Ruth Stone First Book Prize (Big Lucks Books, 2016) The CSU First Book Poetry Competition (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2015) The Subito Press Poetry Contest (University of Colorado at Boulder, 2015) Omnidawn Open Poetry Book Competition (Omnidawn Publishing, 2014)