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Distilling over twenty years-worth of creative material, Pistachios and Frames is the debut poetry collection by acclaimed writer and musician Sasha Frere-Jones.
The vernacular has many nicknames: speakerly, familiar, oral. Poetry begins here, as language derived from talking, but the tumble of theory is how we polish our stones. Abstraction and reorganization and synthesis—invisible forms of the natural world—are three legs of the brain’s long table. No effort can be wasted in a time of genocide and atomized sociality. Sasha Frere-Jones has been using all the tools to write poems since 1982. Pistachios and Frames is a celebration of how we talk to our lovers and children and tormentors. These poems cloak the ancient fact that poets and their readers are closer to god.
— Anahid Nersessian
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Working from the outside in, Pistachios and Frames follows the money as it “oozes through our nasty candy"—winding around our schools, newspapers, pop songs, and bodily organs—on its way to funding the destruction of life at gruesome scales large and small.
These gruff and loving poems take you by the shoulder to say No, you haven’t been making this shit up and then bring you along in their recommitment to the “fellowship of life.”
— Charles Theonia
"Sasha Frere-Jones’s Pistachios and Frames enchants the particulars of our global wreckage with a logic of solidarity that loops us out of lonely exhaustion and into a potent everyday. These poems arrive at their own content with blunt belief and defiance that can only be called love. Frere-Jones reminds us of the nonequivalence of all that’s irreplaceable— life and faith and pain and soul. Do what the poems tell you and look up from the page. You’ll see it yourself."
— Rosie Stockton
"Pistachios and Frames sustains the insurgent, life-giving energy of riot by keeping consciousness on edge—enraged, alert, softened in recognition: the recognition that "love is none other than the dialectic." This is a book with dimension, one that refuses the psychic and perceptual flattening through which power secures submission. We’re given back every aspect of ourselves, awakened to god, to the shape of our fears and beliefs. With every page, Sasha Frere-Jones reminds us that poetry is a great practice, one capable of distilling the violence of capital, its constitutive abstraction, into concrete yet ever-evolving forms. "We're drinking a fruit slushie from Shan Fu—mango, blueberry, strawberry, peach / A helicopter has been hovering above Seward Park for three hours." These continuities are anything but smooth. They constitute the texture of our everyday debasement, until a voice gives them form, a shape we can move through, working our way inward from the outside, or the other way around."
— Mirene Arsanios
"Tenderly elegiac, terrifically impatient for a world more worthy of the dead, Pistachios and Frames takes seriously the responsibilities we incur by waking up, by being with others in language. With surprising humor and enduring heat, Frere-Jones critiques economies of discourse that attempt to complicate and depoliticize what is blessedly simple: the unity of life, the pace of love over fear. These poems meet solidarity’s demand—be open to risk, to loss, to forging new connections on the way to killing the power."
— Laura Henriksen
"From that rare breed of music critics who’ve got bars of their own, Sasha Frere-Jones delivers the poetic solace needed to survive in a city that has become all too recognizable in its unrecognizableness. In these pages, we catch a glimpse of urban life’s last gasp: claustrophobic protests, multiple trips to CVS instead of “one big shop,” and mornings spent with a Fairuz playlist. Plus, my man is mad funny. You’ll dig this."
— Idris Robinson