Books
The Wild Side of the Window
Won First Place for Poetry Chapbooks in the Annual Delaware Press Association Communication Contest 2019
National First Place for Poetry Chapbooks from The National Federation of Press Women 2019
Praise for The Wild Side of the Window:
The poems in Irene Fick’s The Wild Side of the Window are artful, compact, and often funny, even when contending with grim subject matter like cancer or divorce. Fick isn’t afraid to make herself vulnerable, or to write unsentimentally about things that are sad — but for all the losses that they record, these poems aren’t about death; they’re about lived experience seen in hindsight, and life relished in the moment.
—James Arthur, author of Charms Against Lightning
In The Wild Side of the Window, Irene Fick captures our most human attempts: a wife as dancing queen in “flannels and fuzzy socks,” a mother waking and forgetting momentarily that she has cancer, and a woman wondering what it’s like to die in Kmart. With startling images and thoughtful line breaks, Fick guides the reader to discovery with each poem. Adrienne Rich said, “Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know,” and Irene Fick knows this.
—Ethan Joella, author of A Little Hope and A Quiet Life
Irene Fick’s poems touch on many of poetry’s most enduring subjects—family, memory, aging, love, and loss—but with unexpected verve and blinding flashes of humor and wisdom. The past comes alive in poems about lace bikinis and the lure of cigarettes, but the future we all fear is never far off. If you’re a woman of a certain age—or a man who loves one—The Wild Side of the Window is the book for you.
—Sue Ellen Thompson, winner of the 2010 Maryland Author Award and editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry
The Stories We Tell
Won First Place for Poetry Chapbooks in the Annual Delaware Press Association Communication Contest 2014
National First Place for Poetry Chapbooks from The National Federation of Press Women 2014
Praise for The Stories We Tell:
Irene Fick’s first book has stolen my heart with its clear sweet lines, and lack of artifice. Here’s poetry that doesn’t need to persuade, for its presence in the world emerges from a genuine source with immediate connectivity. The title of the book is straightforward, yet it’s rare to create the right story in the right form with themes laid out in a unified vision. Fick is a writer of observation, but more, of felt life. Once you enter her currents of thought, there’s no going back or stopping. To be able to show hard glimpses of reality with beauty and truth is a gift many poets have not achieved. As for fear, age, dementia, illness and death, Fick turns them over to the angels of language where they belong—and they could not do better. I am permanently touched by this book.
—Grace Cavalieri, Producer/Host, “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress”
Fick focuses her journalist’s eyes on her childhood (in an imperfect Italian family in Brooklyn) and her adulthood as though she wanted to be sentimental, but instead nails down her observations with sharply delineated details. Entering the domain of poetry, she combines words in novel combinations, often juxtaposing one truth against another with fresh vision, originality, and regard for the innate music of good free verse. One sees ever the sense of discovery, uncovering truths without need for fancy phrases, pretty devices or four-letter words, because, poem after poem, the perceptions and combinations are right on target.
—Elisavietta Ritchie, Author of Tiger Upstairs on Connecticut Avenue
