
The follow-up to her 2014 collection Sorrow Arrow (winner of the 2015 Oregon Book Award for Poetry), Emily Kendal Frey’s volume LOVABILITY is a dialogue of social and interpersonal dynamics, as well... Read More
"Frey does her best in Lovability (a title that wickedly goes two ways at once) to make the prosaic sublime. It’s a tragic errand (which she’s hilariously aware of) but a courageous one too…Frey is an intimate and restless poet whose unrepressed, free-associative style makes her work surreal and unpredictable; you’re never quite sure what the poet will say next because she rarely dwells on one thing for too long, and yet one of the strange pleasures of reading her poetry is getting the sense that each poem is about the same thing."- John Ebersole, Tourniquet Review
"This book is what a book of poetry should be: fascinating…What she does in Lovability is she creates these vortices. It’s like if you took, say, a family gathering, with all its despairs and difficulties, and ran it through a confetti machine. Suddenly the waving astronauts are enveloped in clouds of tiny hurts. Each diamond-shaped hurt-fragment sparkles and implies all the others. The meaning is that no single hurt matters. They are an environment."- Anthony Madrid, Rhino
"Frey does her best in Lovability (a title that wickedly goes two ways at once) to make the prosaic sublime. It’s a tragic errand (which she’s hilariously aware of) but a courageous one too…Frey is an intimate and restless poet whose unrepressed, free-associative style makes her work surreal and unpredictable; you’re never quite sure what the poet will say next because she rarely dwells on one thing for too long, and yet one of the strange pleasures of reading her poetry is getting the sense that each poem is about the same thing."– John Ebersole, Tourniquet Review
"This book is what a book of poetry should be: fascinating…What she does in Lovability is she creates these vortices. It’s like if you took, say, a family gathering, with all its despairs and difficulties, and ran it through a confetti machine. Suddenly the waving astronauts are enveloped in clouds of tiny hurts. Each diamond-shaped hurt-fragment sparkles and implies all the others. The meaning is that no single hurt matters. They are an environment."– Anthony Madrid, Rhino