In his prize-winning debut, How the Losers Love What's Lost, Frank stares, unflinchingly, into the many faces of disappointment and loss: loss of control, perspective, position, a loved one, the self. Exploring a variety of received forms, he inhabits persona after persona of outsiders, both loser and witness for the lost. Frank is "a sly cartographer" of this landscape steeped with human failings and lushly populated by the 'losers' who try to live, even thrive, within it.
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"...one of the most empathetic, structurally-polished, and fully-realized collections of contemporary poetry in recent memory...These poems are a body of narratives, and their connective tissue is loss. Frank honors these losses with reverent attentiveness...The losers we discover here are given voices whose timbre, content, and strength redeem their individual losses. And while the stories divulged within this impressive book are what display how the losers love what's lost, Frank's mastery of language and his attention to empathy give those losers authority and grace."--Raul Alvarez, Los Angeles Review
Review
"...one of the best young poets I've come across in many years." (Alan Shapiro, judge )
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By Justin Hamm
Format:Paperback
How does the chorus to the classic Tom Petty song go? "Even the losers get lucky sometimes?" Well, not in Patrick Ryan Frank's How the Losers Love What's Lost. Each of the poems in this collection presents us with a character plagued with loneliness, awkwardness, or just plain bad fortune. Here we find the internal damage of the gambler, the gun moll, the prison inmate, the character actor, the regretful alcoholic, the one-armed man, and the nondescript skinny kid from high school, to name just a few.
How the Losers Love What's Lost contains a handful of truly standout poems but needs the poems around them to attain full power; the hard times of the great poems and the simply good ones work together until the collection turns, finally, into a kind of protest song for social justice, but without ever trying to be--without ever seeming corny or intent on anything but showing how life feels for the cursed.
I would make one recommendation for reading How the Losers Love What's Lost. Read it while reading something else at the same time. Frank's ability to find a varied cast of no-luck cases is impressive, and his style is fantastic--he often writes in formal verse and his rhymes, internal, slant, or conventional, add a nice touch--but despite the different speakers/characters, there is a sameness of mood that would sometimes wear on me if I read more than five or six poems in a sitting. However, when I stepped away for a while, read something else and then returned, I found that what was sameness now became cohesiveness and dropped me immediately back into Frank's landscape.
Coming back to read in shorter bursts also allowed me to see subtle ways in which Frank plays on the expectations he sets up. Occasionally he subverts our notion of who is the "loser" in a given poem. For instance, in "The People in Those Places," we're told a businessman hears a prostitute and a boy through the wall. Based on this first description, we expect the "loser" here to be the prostitute or the boy. But as the poem progresses and the businessman strains to hear what is happening before finally imagining a tender scene on the other side of the wall, we feel his profound loneliness and come to understand that he's the one who is missing something important.
Later, in "Given a Gift Certificate to a Fortune Teller," we find the same kind of subversion. The poem begins with a man being told by the fortuneteller that he has "the saddest hands in town." When the cards come out, they show "poverty and sickness,/misunderstandings." This bleak fortune continues for a time, but then the fortuneteller suddenly moves into the role of "loser" herself, revealing the weight of what she believes she knows about others:
She talked about her visions; her voice got deeper:
a leaking bowl; a high plateau, so bare
and very dry. She said she couldn't sleep
most nights because of what she knew, or feared
As I mentioned above, all of the poems in the book are strong, but a handful are of that rare unforgettable variety. "Homophobia" is one of these. In seven pages, Frank compresses a novel's worth of psychology about a young man tortured to the point of violence by his own sexuality. It is one of the grittiest and most brutal poems in the collection, and it is also probably the best.
"Just Some Noise" is another standout. Here Frank begins with the classic horror movie set-up: a couple of uncertain teenagers "parked in the dark of some backroad." After hearing "that noise," they drive back toward town, relieved to freed from the awkward moment. But the relief is short-lived: when the girl gets out of the car, she finds a metal hook dangling from the door handle. The last third of the poem flashes to a hookless man:
But back beside the road, a one-handed man
is crying. Nothing ever turns out right--
that careless second with the circular saw
while making a gift for a girl: a heart-shaped frame
he'd never finish, never fill. Bad luck
and circumstance: no money for prosthetics,
just a metal hook and medications
against the stares, unfriendly bar-stool questions,
the years of wanting to hold a woman's hips.
Now this: sore-armed in the dark, embarrassed, cold,
when all he wanted was that little thrill
of seeing people happy, just that one
little sliver of someone else's fun.
"Nothing ever turns out right . . ."; "Bad luck/and circumstance"; ". . .all he wanted was that little thrill/of seeing people happy . . ." If How the Losers Love What's Lost was a pulp novel, any of these could serve as the tag line. Here are the lives and the people most of us would prefer not to think about, but Patrick Ryan Frank gives them to us with a sympathy and skill that makes them hard to forget. You should definitely check this collection out.
How the Losers Love What's Lost contains a handful of truly standout poems but needs the poems around them to attain full power; the hard times of the great poems and the simply good ones work together until the collection turns, finally, into a kind of protest song for social justice, but without ever trying to be--without ever seeming corny or intent on anything but showing how life feels for the cursed.
I would make one recommendation for reading How the Losers Love What's Lost. Read it while reading something else at the same time. Frank's ability to find a varied cast of no-luck cases is impressive, and his style is fantastic--he often writes in formal verse and his rhymes, internal, slant, or conventional, add a nice touch--but despite the different speakers/characters, there is a sameness of mood that would sometimes wear on me if I read more than five or six poems in a sitting. However, when I stepped away for a while, read something else and then returned, I found that what was sameness now became cohesiveness and dropped me immediately back into Frank's landscape.
Coming back to read in shorter bursts also allowed me to see subtle ways in which Frank plays on the expectations he sets up. Occasionally he subverts our notion of who is the "loser" in a given poem. For instance, in "The People in Those Places," we're told a businessman hears a prostitute and a boy through the wall. Based on this first description, we expect the "loser" here to be the prostitute or the boy. But as the poem progresses and the businessman strains to hear what is happening before finally imagining a tender scene on the other side of the wall, we feel his profound loneliness and come to understand that he's the one who is missing something important.
Later, in "Given a Gift Certificate to a Fortune Teller," we find the same kind of subversion. The poem begins with a man being told by the fortuneteller that he has "the saddest hands in town." When the cards come out, they show "poverty and sickness,/misunderstandings." This bleak fortune continues for a time, but then the fortuneteller suddenly moves into the role of "loser" herself, revealing the weight of what she believes she knows about others:
She talked about her visions; her voice got deeper:
a leaking bowl; a high plateau, so bare
and very dry. She said she couldn't sleep
most nights because of what she knew, or feared
As I mentioned above, all of the poems in the book are strong, but a handful are of that rare unforgettable variety. "Homophobia" is one of these. In seven pages, Frank compresses a novel's worth of psychology about a young man tortured to the point of violence by his own sexuality. It is one of the grittiest and most brutal poems in the collection, and it is also probably the best.
"Just Some Noise" is another standout. Here Frank begins with the classic horror movie set-up: a couple of uncertain teenagers "parked in the dark of some backroad." After hearing "that noise," they drive back toward town, relieved to freed from the awkward moment. But the relief is short-lived: when the girl gets out of the car, she finds a metal hook dangling from the door handle. The last third of the poem flashes to a hookless man:
But back beside the road, a one-handed man
is crying. Nothing ever turns out right--
that careless second with the circular saw
while making a gift for a girl: a heart-shaped frame
he'd never finish, never fill. Bad luck
and circumstance: no money for prosthetics,
just a metal hook and medications
against the stares, unfriendly bar-stool questions,
the years of wanting to hold a woman's hips.
Now this: sore-armed in the dark, embarrassed, cold,
when all he wanted was that little thrill
of seeing people happy, just that one
little sliver of someone else's fun.
"Nothing ever turns out right . . ."; "Bad luck/and circumstance"; ". . .all he wanted was that little thrill/of seeing people happy . . ." If How the Losers Love What's Lost was a pulp novel, any of these could serve as the tag line. Here are the lives and the people most of us would prefer not to think about, but Patrick Ryan Frank gives them to us with a sympathy and skill that makes them hard to forget. You should definitely check this collection out.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By bookerish
Format:Paperback
Patrick Ryan Frank's poignant, absorbing, often funny and always entertaining book of poems is one of the most refreshing collections of poetry I've read in a long time. A voice to watch, and a live one, indeed.
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