Stephen Frech

From the form and formlessness of the river to the slippery passages of memory to the brilliant sequence where sleep too becomes rivered, Stephen Frech’s lyric poems dwell in the threshold between realms where we lose ourselves and dissolve into elegant chaos. Perhaps we most often come to poetry because we seek to be lifted across the borders of wonder. Into Night’s Tent is a brief and potent carriage into the other-world, where the body is made strange and new by its permeability, “a skin boat sailing toward luck.”

Jennifer Sweeney

“Tell me the child is going to make it / over thin ice, / that we know from the surface of things / what will bear us”, writes Stephen Frech, inferring the unease of sinking into a place with no easy answers. After all, what do we tell a child about life's tenuous balancing act? Frech understands no promises can be made, particularly in respect to the unspoken, but implied question in these poems: How much can we ourselves bear? Into Night’s Tent is a haunting world of dimly lit dreamscapes—in photographs, pools of water, little unseen ravines. It’s a world where every little detail carries its darker twin within: the effortless gallop of horses becomes an enormous lifting, the safe harbor of sleep is also an insatiable longing for torpor. Even a body breaking into bloom is at once a promise and a crisis. These poems are terrifying, but beautiful and necessary. In time, Frech assures us “the shattered pieces of light / reassemble on the current,” but not without slowing down a restless self that is always reflecting back. Into Night’s Tent reminds us of the immense work necessary to recognize the moment for what we so often miss: “the great and small gestures of being here.”

Nils Michals