Customer Reviews

Famous (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

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Kathleen Flenniken's Famous has been one of my favorite reads in poetry this year. Her attention to images, phrases, the murmurs of gorgeous language and life, arrested me. In the poem "Sotto Voce" she writes "Aren't all of us / waiting to be discovered?" This book felt like a peeling and peeling back, moving deeper into the discovery of oneself, discoveries of what distinguishes and connects us to strangers, to intimate others. Several of my favorite poems explored marriage in unexpected, lush, and provocative ways. The poem "What I Saw" describes viewing a swimmer emerge from a lake, a sympathetic shiver from the poem's speaker. It concludes: "She turned / her back but didn't wait to peel away / her seal-black suit and what I saw / was ampleness and white, the beauty / of the world in late September. / Sometimes when I think of it I stare. / Sometimes she is me and I am her." I felt so much the same in reading Famous, drawn to this book's ample beauty.

Kathleen Flenniken's wonderful debut, Famous, explores modern life, history, work & family, and asks what it means for us to be famous, remembered, important to another person, or, finally, to ourselves. Using humor, "Nature abhors a vacuum/but God loves a good vacuuming." ("It's Not You, It's Me") as well as piercing insight: " the boy who has drifted an entire lifetime/into their oncoming lane." ("Gil's Story"), Flenniken balances skilled craftsmanship with riveting story-telling. In "To Ease My Mind" Flenniken takes on the persona of Mary Todd Lincoln amid Civil War carnage, finding her consolation in kidskin gloves and emboidery so fine "one might believe a fairy tatted them. I might need box upon box of them/to tell me who I am." -- I find this poem a dead-on commentary on the waste and vanity of contemporary America at war. In "If We Could Live Here," Flenniken is plane passenger on take-off: "We are split by an aisle, a soon to be/fracture in the fuselage," and imagines what life would be like if we always lived in that moment before " . . . engines screaming, full throttle towards heaven -- /all the daily baggage/would fall away . . ." Winner of the Prairie Schooner book prize. Highly recommended. Congratulations, Kathleen!

Kathleen Flenniken's voice is gentle and open-hearted but never cloying or sappy, intelligent but never pretentious, funny and playful but never scornful, and her diction and tone are wonderfully controlled and free of false steps and sour notes. The quiet, understated grace in poem after poem proves that modesty really is a virtue, which makes the book's title all the more amusing (especially considering the way the cover design resembles a Penguin Classic). For all its modesty, though, the material is wide-ranging: from parental devotion (describing a third-grade recorder concert, she writes "By 'Go Tell Aunt Rhodie,' the audience / is moved by their sheer pretty-goodness") to the delicious safety of reading about heroes without having to be one ("... most of us / decide to remain minor characters / like the quixotic neighbor growing / bonsai sequoias, ...") to ennui ("These evenings, thin as glass / and slipping just as slowly downhill. // They're what make you what you are. / Not those engraved occasions, white-tie audiences, / Everybody raise a toast, not the great seduction scene, / remarking on the perfect height of the desk,"), and on through sex, death, grief, and the International House of Pancakes. There's nothing showy or flashy here, just the kind of warm, insightful honesty that you hope for from a close friend.