What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Hardcover)

Author: Frank Stanford 

Foreward: Dean Young

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (2015)

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

As Dean Young writes in the Foreword: "Many of these poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood in river mud . . . Frank Stanford, demonically prolific, approaches the poem not as an exercise of rhetoric or a puzzle of signifiers but as a man 'looking for his own tongue' in a knife-fight with a ghost."

"This vibrant volume forms a comprehensive selection from his huge output, and includes published and unpublished poetry and prose, archival photographs, original manuscripts, a rejection letter, an interview, and excerpts from the 'ungovernable' fifteen-thousand-line epic poem, 'The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You' . . . Stanford’s poems are by turns earthly and visionary."

–The New Yorker

“The big event in poetry for 2015 will likely be the long-awaited resurrection of Frank Stanford, a legendary badass from Arkansas, much of whose poetry has been unavailable since his suicide at the age of 29 in 1978 . . . Stanford was a hell of a metaphor-maker and simile-slinger, and could cast a spell of extreme intensity with a flick of his wrist.”

–NPR

"The book [What About This], layered with north Delta dialect and superstition, departs again and again on dream-like thought sequences in which unpredictable imagery continually startles the imagination and overwhelms it with visceral beauty."

–Matthew Henriksen