Selected poems by

Kenneth Frost

248 pages, $15 cover price

ISBN: 978-1-59948-482-2

Release Date:  September 9, 2014.

Kenneth Frost grew up in New York City. He taught at Columbia University and The New School before he and his wife, poet Carolyn Gelland, moved to Maine to read and write in a solitude they could only dream about in New York City. His two previous collections of poems, Night Flight (2010) and Time On Its Own (2012), were published by Main Street Rag. In his poems, he is stalking words in orbit.

Praise for Night Flight:

Here is an imagination so lively and detailed, so sensory and aural, it is no longer imagination. Kenneth Frost’s poems in Night Flight are reminiscent of Lautreamont in the way they embrace and invite the presence of creatures from the other side….delightfully. At the same time, his control is consummate in every line, his craft is unnoticeably exact, there’s not a word out of place. Refreshing. –Mani Rao

Praise for Time On Its Own:

Kenneth Frost writes poems with imagery that touches our nerve ends directly and demands our immediate response. His surreal juxtapositions are delivered for the most
part with a slow jazzy beat. There is a poem for everyone here. Frost’s subjects range from landscapes to metaphysics, from spiders to theology…. In “The Figure-Skater,” Frost magically turns a female skater into a creator of universes and an archive of memories…. In “Buddy Rich On The Drums”… Frost pieces together one inspired image after another…. The poem ends in a holy froth mimicking that fiery drummer perfectly.  Well done. And efficacious as hell.  –Dennis Daly

NIETZSCHE IN ROME

Dazzled by crystals,
I unpack time.
Mirages help me,
waving their hips
like Salome wooing
the Baptist’s head,
just holding
on to the
magnetic hair.
I am not here
to be
somewhere.
I am here
to be mad.

BLIZZARD

Snowflakes tear
their rags deep
inside alphabets,
searching for vowels
to beat into
wilderness,

long hollow notes
finding a home
in a wolf’s throat
where the wolf
before a bleeding
mirror drinks
each crack.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

His breath stretches
in its wind tunnel’s
cornucopia
till notes grow bold
enough to hear
their birthday openings.

How beautiful
the red-gold hair
Helen shakes
in the high notes
to wake perfume’s
transparent garden
into doorways’
magnetic light.

TIME ON ITS OWN

Did you ever drift
like smoke
from the will’s
cremation in a cigarette?
If I were anywhere

to be found
I would think
something through
the universe
grinning like skidmarks from a tire.

Somewhere beyond
my centipede of echoes
someone insists, “Climb higher, a circus dive
will pull along
cold feet.”

Time is on its own,
it comes on
swaying,
slowly pawing the ground,
searching the world like trash.

BOBCAT

While the doe juggles
her senses
lost in the taut electric
labyrinths of terror,
leaving her eyes’ glitter
in leapfrog periods
punched in the crust,

the bobcat cruises
an empty smile
across the snow,
spreading the smile
like butter on
late afternoon
breathing the dead
solstice, sweet
in its own wind.

This swinging bridge
of bellylaughs
leaps to guzzle fear
sidesaddle
and disappears,
a fu-manchu
moustache of blood.

THE SAN MARCO DRAGON

And there before my eyes
comes bubbling up
out of the cathode ray,
its very waters,
a disembodied shape,

a skyline,
the Basilica San Marco
as reflection joins
reflection in
rainy piazzas.

The Basilica itself,
a simple algorithm,
a program, twenty or so lines—
the way it appears
dot by dot by dot

rising up
with electrons and floating
out on the screen.
Shape, the message chopped
from the pink stone of heaven.