Book Review: How The Losers Love What's Lost

How the Losers Love What's Lost

Patrick Ryan Frank

Four Way Books, 2012. Poetry.

Review by Debrah Lechner

Debrah.Lechner@gmail.com

The portraits of the losers that Patrick Ryan Frank paints in this award-winning book of poetry from Four Way Books are remarkable for how familiar they are, even when the people that populate them are unlike any the reader has met.

What they've lost is familiar, too: sometimes a person, such as the lost child that reappears only through Frank's poetry, as in "Missing Person Photograph;" sometimes an opportunity, as in "The Third-Place Contestant Answers the Questions That Were Not Asked." Frequently the loss is of life. "Emilie Buried" memorializes a woman with a dare-devil streak who allows herself to be buried for three days and then resurrected to the music of a band and applause. She marries, later on, and conceals her dangerous former occupation from her children:

            only when the kids were grown and past adventure

            did she pull out the clippings of herself

            flying with Alligator Jim, swimming

            around Manhattan, being buried alive.

            American Persephone…

            even through those years

            of having kids and housework, she kept a bit

            of that blackness in her body, boxed inside

            her aging heart, both memory and promise.

            And when, at ninety-eight, after all

            those quiet decades, she faced again that depth,

            going slowly down, she saw a girl

            rising up to meet her, slim and pretty

            in a cotton dress, singing beneath her breath.

"Emily Buried" was written for Emilie Neumann Muse, January 14, 1908 – January 26, 2006. Frank writes of other historical personas too, including Jane Mansfield and Juan Peron, former president of Argentina. He also explores a number of phobias, too, including homophobia, considered with empathy in several poems, and the fear of rape in "Virginitiphobia," in this reversal of the persons that might be expected to suffer from it:

            She waited for them to touch the hem of her skirt

            but they were scared and it was cold out there.

                        She arched her back and held her breath,

            eyes closed, but they kept saying them were sorry.

                        She told them to shut the fuck up, and if

            they started to cry, she'd kill them and take the truck

                        and nobody in town would ever know.

But perhaps this poem of pure imagination is one of the most heart-stopping. "What I Want From the World":

            On some bright beach in Hawaii

            in some dim year of the past

            one leper in love with another

            says, Take my hand. That's all—

            sweet joke or two, quick touch,

            an elegy on a postcard.

            Not much, no more than moments

            of luck in a luckless life,

            of trouble beautifully lit.

            So let the lepers think

            that the numbness of their lips

            is love. Let the sharks

            be far and slow. Let

            nobody see their bodies

            as they run into the sea

            with the sun in tatters on

            the water, with laughter, a wind

            through palms that sounds like please.

Patrick Ryan Frank is a poet of noteworthy talent, whose poetry is affecting, and impossible to forget. How the Losers Love What's Lost is an important collection and a brilliant accomplishment.