The Beatles' Second Album

Author: Franklin K.R. Cline

Illustrator: Jasmine Choi

Publisher: Vegetarian Alcoholic Press (2021)

"A Sports Fan, a Poet, an Alcoholic, and a Cherokee all walk into a bar in The Beatles’ Second Album by Franklin K.R. Cline, and what are you doing? You're getting ready to laugh. What you should be considering, though, is how quickly America can turn whoever you are and whatever you love into a punchline. Then, you're in the unfortunate position of somehow trying to remind the country around you that underneath all of the prevailing and pre-conceived narratives about your multi-faceted identity, you are still a human being, capable of loneliness, and love sonnets for Olivia, and long hospital stays, and a kind of meditative ambivalence about the big, ugly nothingness of American mundanity. Franklin K.R. Cline succeeds in these poems at the difficult but much needed task of re-defining these identities into something complex, nuanced, singular, and personal. If you finish this book, and you don't recognize the humanness here, then the joke's on you."

–Ephraim Scott Sommers