Famous (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

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“[Famous] weaves together two seemingly antithetical themes: the comic indignations and attractions of minor celebrities, and the everyday joys and sorrows of family life. . . . Ordinariness—our need for it, and our frustrations with it—becomes Flenniken’s signature subject: the quietest evenings ‘make you what you are.’ Flenniken . . . has fashioned a poetry comfortable with self-imposed limits. . . . She still finds herself searching after mysteries, in board games, novels, and her own life.” —Publishers Weekly Annex.

“There's a winning surface modesty here: it isn't Abraham Lincoln who merits the poem, but his oft-maligned wife; not Edna St. Vincent Millay, but her stay-at-home husband; not the Taj Mahal, but the everyday International House of Pancakes. Still, in Flenniken's hands, these occasions rise toward urgent news—as when, in 'Shampoo,' the memory of a mother's declining health soulfully becomes one with the headline about a submarine's sinking—until the leastmost of us are transformed, poem by poem, into the famous.”—Albert Goldbarth, author of Saving Lives, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

“Unpretentious, self-effacing, earthy, funny, and wise.”—Peggy Shumaker, author of Blaze

“Exploring the external trappings of contemporary life as well as the internal cadences of a mind that wants at once to be ‘shocking and irresistible,’ Kathleen Flenniken takes us into the slipstreams of fame, where our daily dramas play themselves out in the ‘wild uncoded rhythms’ of the imagination.”—Judith Kitchen, author of The House on Eccles Road

“There’s a consistency of voice and diction in Famous that satisfies and a carefully rendered emotional core to the poems, which quietly surprises.”—Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Different Hours

She “became famous, finally, to herself,” Kathleen Flenniken writes. This is the kind of fame at the heart of most lives and at the center of Flenniken’s first collection, the winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Here “a little voice sings / from the back of the auditorium / of my throat. Aren’t all of us / waiting to be discovered?”

The poet’s answer is sometimes grave, sometimes comic, but always tuned to the incidental music of daily life.

Kathleen Flenniken’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, Southern Review, and Prairie Schooner. Coeditor and president of Floating Bridge Press, a publisher of Washington State poets, Flenniken has taught poetry through Writers in the Schools and other arts agencies.

Visit Kathleen Flenniken's website for more information.

Also available from the series: Adonis Garage by Rynn Williams