Spanning more than thirty years of work, Frank X. Gaspar’s Poem Fire: New and Selected maps an American landscape suspended between the luminous and the familiar.
In a voice both bold and vulnerably intimate, these poems meditate on longing through an attention to the world’s smallest gestures—an attention that is not mere sentimentality but an act of resistance against erasure and disappearance. Gaspar turns with equal care to overlooked lives: waitresses, truck drivers, travelers—figures encountered at the edges of intimacy, briefly illuminated in the midst of their routines. As Gaspar writes, “Lights winking among the shuffling cornstalks. And my lantern hissing. My loneliness was my own doing, but I didn’t know.”
“Frank Gaspar's poems are agile and forceful, their narratives clear and absorbing" (Mary Oliver), and are carried by a speaker unconfined by time yet anchored in the sublimity of the everyday. Including work from five previous collections, Poem Fire captures the quiet radiance of lived experience; this collection celebrates the life of a poet with a warm, keen eye.
Price: $18.99
Pages: 190
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Imprint: Autumn House Press
Publication Date:
October 20, 2026
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781637681251
Format: Paperback
"Frank is a master poet—the surprise and exactitude of his diction, the acute vision of his images, his insight into the human condition and his stunning expression of it, as in this line: it’s never the aboutness of anything but the wailing underneath it. The poems, as Whitman wrote, contain multitudes."
—Ellen Bass, from the introduction for Poem Fire
"Frank X. Gaspar is an extraordinarily rare gift in our world: a poet who wishes to see it all, to bring the entire overwhelming experience of life and death into the forge of his heart, and to transform it there—not into a tidy truth, but into a great art that shows us the miraculous grace of what was, what is, and what—together and alone—we can be." —Joseph Fasano, author of The Last Song of the World
“I love Frank X. Gaspar’s poems, and not only because of the distinctive take he brings forth in some of these poems about the American War in Viet Nam, although they are admirable and strikingly original in their regard for a war still fought in the hallways of academe. What’s most moving to me about this work is the way Gaspar is able to wed a finely tuned regard for form, with the sweeping arch of his vivid imagination. This collection is fresh and new and struggles to say that more is possible in our poetry than we’d previously imagined. I believe it’s that good. I also know that it’s a collection that I want to share with my poet and writer friends for the rich variety of poetic expression that can be found here. If you love poetry, this is a collection you’ll want to have. I know I will return to these poems, often."
—Bruce Weigl, author of Apostle of Desire
Frank X. Gaspar was born and raised in Provincetown, Massachusetts, of Azorean Descent (Pico, Sao Miguel). He is the author of five collections of poetry, including Late Rapturous (Autumn House Press, 2012) and Night of a Thousand Blossoms (Alice James Books, 2004), named one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry of 2004, and two novels. Among his many awards are multiple inclusions in Best American Poetry, four Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and a California Arts Council Fellowship in poetry. His debut novel, Leaving Pico, was a Barnes and Noble Discovery Prize winner, a recipient of the California Book Award for First Fiction, and a New York Times Notable Book. Currently, he teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Pacific University, Oregon, and lives in Long Beach, CA.
