The landmark book by the 2014/15 Philadelphia poet laureate, beloved for its easy-going empathy & generous solidarity, it is also a glittering, detail-encrusted love-letter to cities of "otherly love.
10 years later, Sherlock's achievement is as fresh, energizing & necessary as ever: Conjuring and ventriloquizing our voices, phrases, hopes, sky-blotting disappointments, manic crazy schemes & fevered dreams . . . then beaming them back at us, full force, until love grows wild again—through every crack in every heart and every sidewalk.
The son of a secretary and a city worker—and winner of a 2013 Pew Fellowship—Sherlock's work has always sprung, root & branch, from the lives of ordinary folks, in relationships with others and their environments, as natural animals. In this, he's been aided immeasurably by his history as door-man at Dirty Frank's Bar in Philadelphia, regarded by its patrons and other discerning folks as the greatest Bar in the known universe.
Sherlock's mission, then? "Be a face for poetry. Raise the art form’s profile in the city. Chip away at the notion of poetry as a hermetic, alienated practice. Bring it into our everyday city living. Make it interactive. Participatory. Inviting."
And that has been, exactly, the growing gift of Frank's work, and why readers didn't greet this book and its poems with mere enthusiasm—they embraced it with a bear-hug from their soul. As will you—dig it.
Frank Sherlock is the author of Space Between These Lines Not Dedicated (ixnay press, 2014), Over Here (Factory School, 2009), The City Real & Imagined (w/ CAConrad) (Factory School, 2010), and a collaboration with Brett Evans entitled Ready-to-Eat Individual. Por Aquí, a Spanish-language collection of works translated by Carlos Soto-Román, was published in Chile in the fall of 2014. Poems beyond the page have found their forms in installations/performances/exhibitions, including Refuse/Reuse: Language for the Common Landfill, Kensington Riots Project, Neighbor Ballads, and B.Franklin Basement Tapes. Sherlock is a recipient of the 2013 Pew Fellowship in the Arts for literature. He was the Poet Laureate of Philadelphia.
on consignment via Dan Shepelavy