Reviews

I've heard it said that The Book of Frank is this generation's Dream Songs, but I think The Book of Frank surges ahead in experiment and lasting power.
—Maggie Nelson, author of THE ARGONAUTS

This is not merely a desert island book, but a book for a desert world. The Book of Frank lilts through the strangeness, brutality, and beauty of our often terrible age. These are unsparing poems, and it has been a gift to be sweetly wrecked by them again and again, never quite knowing whether to meet the mythic Frank with laughter or with tears.
—Anne Boyer, author of THE UNDYING

CAConrad's The Book of Frank enters like a Dixie tornado of nightmare surreality, the trash of USA demon seed consciousness assaulting the senses. CA's magic is his poetics, the transference of rotten hearts into crystal intellect, angel dreams, rhythms seeking love, and locating it in the essence of ritual and language. The Book of Frank is a contemporary masterpiece of radical prose in which the writer's soul sings across the page, rising above the indignities of Earthbound chaos, where humor and horror dance to the beat of the living dead.
—Thurston Moore

I can never have enough CAConrad, like paprika or wisdom in disguise. Is he the Frank of the book?
—Bernadette Mayer, author of MEMORY

Conrad’s approach is a welcome change from high-minded poetry that steadfastly ignores the body in all its dumb, limiting materiality. Rimbaud declared that “I is another”; Conrad’s work shows us that the body itself is the first source of alienation and estrangement from the self, and is thus the true subject of poetry. Only by engaging this body, by forcing ourselves to travel through the shames and humiliations of its portals, can we achieve transport.
—Christopher Schmidt, Bookforum

At once charming and frightening, The Book of Frank will certainly take the top of your head off, and it might just replace it with something better.
—Noah Eli Gordon, Boston Review

The book offers provocative language and surprising subject matter throughout. The images are surreal, simple, startling and original... Frankly speaking, Mr. Conrad is a poet worth reading. Highly recommended.
—Charles Kruger, The Rumpus

Conrad has created a intriguing book of poems, original, lucid and accessible in the best sense of the word. To read them is to enter into his world.
—Mary Wilson, MAKE Mag

In The Book of Frank, CAConrad recasts this birth; he makes a cast of this birth; he casts a new son from it; like Warhol, he generates counterfeits and multiples; like Warhol, these images start to resemble one another, to enjoy a paradoxical life in and as Art that totally replaces the horizon line of conventional biology, temporality and experience.
—Joyelle McSweeney, Jacket2

I…find that it takes risks. There are words in this book that speak to those who always find beauty within the filth. Just sit there…after reading, take a breath, and admire the beauty hidden within the words.
—Saku Egon Evon, Columbia Poetry Review