Somewhere Between the Stem & the Fruit - Poems by Gwen Frost

Publication Date: July 1, 2020
Paperback, 88 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-62-5

Available from Small Press Distribution

Somewhere between the stem and the fruit is that paradoxical nexus, the point that is both connection and separation, from where you came, to what you are becoming, the scene of the severing, the letting go, the stepping away, the necessary violence and the radical isolation required to be oneself, wholly. And, perhaps, holy. “The poems are written / before they occur to me,” Gwen Frost declares at the conclusion of her
shattering first collection. “Something about a scar, something about a hymn.” She says that poetry saved her life, making this volume a document of that on-going process of healing, and a gift and a hope for others on the same journey.

Foremost, it is a document of a contemporary young woman negotiating her way through a perilous world. “Turns out, there are a million different ways to kill a girl,” she observes in “Watch,” a poem that references Hitchcock’s advice to “torture the women” in order to make a popular film, and by extension the misogynistic voyeurism that fetishizes violence against women. This book documents more than a few of those ways, and nowhere more chillingly than in the poem “sticking heads in the sand,” in which the query “How was your summer?” follows up almost casually with another question, “What was your rapist’s name?” In the inventory of anticipated experience for a young woman, “summer love and sexual assault / adventures and attacks” go hand in hand, “heads pushed into sand” both an act of violence and an act of willful forgetting.

Gwen Frost won’t forget, and won’t let us forget. She is fiercely self-examining and self-revealing, admitting her chief fear is “what I am capable of, I am afraid / that I could kill a man, / and I am afraid / that I would like it.” In lieu of this (perhaps understandable) act of violence, she exorcises and expiates through her verse. In the process, she might save us along with herself. She concludes that she “will write one, unshareable poem, / and I will let it die with me, simple and / forever, folded neatly in my throat.” This is her one prediction that we must hope is untrue, for we need her to write many, many more poems, and to share them for many years to come.

Praise for Gwen Frost & Somewhere Between the Stem & the Fruit

Gwen Frost’s Somewhere Between the Stem & the Fruit is a startling, gut-gasping, visceral debut collection. Her work sings of ferocious and tender spaces, of “moments of wet wings,” “rows of rind teeth,” and the power of poetry as resistance and radical feminist joy. In this book, language swirls with gorgeous grotesquery and sharp lines: “when the crows come to eat my eyes out / I want you to know that I probably fell asleep / with the window open.” Truly one of the most talented new poets out there today, I keep returning to Frost’s poems with kaleidoscopic curiosity and fruiting awe. For, “the heart of the poem is the echo” and Somewhere Between the Stem & the Fruit echoes forth in infinite universes.

—Jane Wong, author of Overpour & How Not to Be Afraid of Everything

Gwen Frost’s Somewhere Between the Stem & the Fruit is an exploration of the “lineage of pain / in how we are made.” Frost’s poems deep-dive into death, unafraid to note that “someone must body the blame” for the darkness we carry. Yet here is the clever seduction, the bravado, the verve of these poems: “the lesson reads in reverse.” By looking at death, we understand the faith and relationships we birth in our lives, and are all the sweeter for it.

—Carly Joy Miller, author of Ceremonial & Like a Beast

Poetry, writes Gwen Frost, is “direct eye-contact with the present,” and she gazes deep in these poems at the beauties and terrors before her at every moment. “In a true effort to be unbreakable” and “holding holy tales of Possible,” Frost speaks fearlessly back—as she puts it—“unto, into, the wordless blunder that fear does become.” These poems—gutsy, formally inventive, powerfully vulnerable, vulnerably powerful—in their urgent revelations and startling dislocations, give us a life tinged with the elusive and possibly impossible: “I can’t hear my newborn baby / but she smells like the sacrificial ashes / from a bonfire puzzle of corsets / I will burn her a bridge to cross over.” We cross that bridge on every blazing and rebirthing page.

—Bruce Beasley, author of All Soul Parts Returned, Theophobia, & other books

Gwen Frost is the author of this book, and (so far) no other books. After winning first-place in the Oregon slam-poetry competition Verselandia in 2015, Gwen studied poetry and political theory at Western Washington Honors College. Somewhere between the Stem & the Fruit is her first full-length publication. Gwen is now living in Portland, Oregon where she is working on her next book, and taking a deep breath.