poems by

Kenneth Frost

Poetry chapbook, 48 pages, $7 cover price

($5 if ordered from the MSR Online Bookstore)

ISBN: 978-1-59948-278-1

Released: 2010

Kenneth Frost grew up in New York City and Long Island.  He received his Bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, lived in London for a year in order to meet with the poet/painter David Jones. He taught at Columbia University and The New School in New York City before he and his wife, the poet Carolyn Gelland, moved to Maine in order to read and write in a solitude they could only dream about in New York City. He is stalking words in orbit.

At the outset of this collection Ken Frost guides us through an empty room and into the night sky on a flight that takes the reader on a journey beyond and beneath the darkness. With clarity, purpose, and economy, Frost writes with a fresh and succinct quality reminiscent of A.R. Ammons and Carl Sandburg. In “Nietzsche in Rome” he declares I am not here / to be / somewhere. / I am here / to be mad. Yet we traverse jungle, mountain, desert, and forest. Along the way we meet angels, coyotes, bears and crows, even the Dalai Lama, Jackson Pollack, a senile aunt, and other interesting characters, all who engage us throughout this Night Flight.

Jonathan K. Rice
Publisher/Editor Iodine Poetry Journal,
author of UKULELE and other poems

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.

TERRORIST

Angels could tell me how it feels
spending my life crawling between
the zoomlens of a reptile’s eye
and a spotlight heating up
confessions in a surgical
tube that a doctor wants to stick
everywhere.
I wonder if
a mugger carries a good luck
animal in the zoo cage
of his lead pipe, rattling
his witch doctor’s spaceship
into the storm that he creates
and whether bums and rats pass in
and out of one another, one
with their underground highway.
A dead slave could tell, but won’t.
Neither will this telescopic sight.

Living a life inside this sun,
crosslines that push the inner walls
of zero so it won’t cave in,
I get caught in the shepherd’s crook
of my own triggerfinger as
it pulls me back to life and death.

WINDOW-WASHER

Lowering
the lifeboat of
our platform from
the roof each day,
I sort of know
what escapees
of shipwrecks feel
looking in
at the portholes
like peeping toms.
I concentrate
on soaping up
and shining glass
so the roulette
wheel of sunlight
won’t skid my head
around its track.
As I move down,
sideways and down,
I read my life
in the headlines
my printing press
is slapping out:
“They didn’t know
that he was there
till he was not.”