Homeless at Home is a series of letters addressed to a deceased father, whose life was shattered and fragmented by war, loss, and economic instability, and further splintered by generational strife and estrangement.
With an emotionally complex voice that intercuts global events and personal history, the letters strive to speak with the father, to bring him up to date with "current" events and with the poetic life of the speaker. Homeless at Home offers the reader a hard-earned, clear-eyed, passionate rendering of the father/daughter relationship.
Frym writes that "these poems are guided by Jack Spicer's notion that poetry is an argument between the dead and the living, a kind of correspondence."
Review: "A passionate and unforgettable meditation on family...A breathless book. A poet swimming at the height of her powers. An epistle for what poetry gives and takes."
-Ray Gonzalez, The Bloomsbury Review
"'How I Learned'...achieves moments of eloquence, sharing the street-savvy wisdom of an impressive chorus of reclaimed voices."
-The New York Times Book Review
"Frym turns an unflinching eye on human interaction, capturing casual and intimate exchanges...her politically charged narratives are among her best..."
-Publisher's Weekly
"Frym's work displays an inexorable and untarnished ear for human communication-no matter the dialect or point of view."
-Oakland Tribune
"Like any period style, nouveau abstraction has its exceptional practitioners. Gloria Frym might turn out to be the best of them. She endows each of her small self-contained world units with a spherical perfection-like a Calder mobile so exquisitely made it will rotate forever..."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"The prose poem is relatively new in American poetry...Frym is one of its finest practitioners."
-The Baltimore Sun
"Frym's voice is fresh, her ear for dialogue is true, her eye is exact."
-American Book Review
"Gloria Frym's poem sequence-Homeless at Home-comes to us on wavelengths of darkly humorous lyricism capable of transmitting states of longing, wonder, and rage at the injustices of the human polis, with clarity and wit."
-Anselm Hollo
"Homeless at Home is a profoundly accomplished work, an elevated triumph. Deeply moving, astute, acute, it is an important work of great depth and presence."
-David Meltzer
Bio: GLORIA FRYM'S books of poetry include By Ear, Back to Forth, and Impossible Affection. Her short story collections are How I Learned and Distance No Object. Since 1987, she has been a member of the Core Faculty of the Poetics Program at New College of California in San Francisco.
