Lovability - by Emily Kendal Frey (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The follow-up to her 2014 collection Sorrow Arrow (winner of the 2015 Oregon Book Award for Poetry), Emily Kendal Frey's volume LOVABILITY is a dialogue of social and interpersonal dynamics, as well as an exploration of the feelings of freedom and longing they produce. "Scourged the river bottom for my lost self"-- she writes in the collection's final poem, "I Became Less Acceptable to Those in Power"-- "Brought them up/ Touched their face/ The armor/ Split and leaking light." A professional counselor and teacher, Frey's work in LOVABILITY uses direct, image-driven poems to name the world we are a part of, to listen in. LOVABILITY was a finalist for the 2022 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

Review Quotes

"Frey does her best in Lovability (a title that wickedly goes two ways at once) to make the prosaic sublime. It's a tragic errand (which she's hilariously aware of) but a courageous one too...Frey is an intimate and restless poet whose unrepressed, free-associative style makes her work surreal and unpredictable; you're never quite sure what the poet will say next because she rarely dwells on one thing for too long, and yet one of the strange pleasures of reading her poetry is getting the sense that each poem is about the same thing."--John Ebersole "Tourniquet Review"

"This book is what a book of poetry should be: fascinating...What she does in Lovability is she creates these vortices. It's like if you took, say, a family gathering, with all its despairs and difficulties, and ran it through a confetti machine. Suddenly the waving astronauts are enveloped in clouds of tiny hurts. Each diamond-shaped hurt-fragment sparkles and implies all the others. The meaning is that no single hurt matters. They are an environment."--Anthony Madrid "Rhino"

About the Author

Emily Kendal Frey is the author of The Grief Performance (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Sorrow Arrow (Octopus Books, 2014), winner of the 2015 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. She is a teacher and therapist and lives in Portland, Oregon.