Praise for The Fragility of Winter

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I’ve been a fan of Irene Fick’s poetry forever; but I never expected to be so taken and stunned by her new book, The Fragility of Winter. Fick’s family becomes my family: a mother in a bowling outfit, suddenly not depressed; an aunt barricading herself away from imaginary predators; a grandmother we see through life; supplies of sympathy cards from the Dollar Store. The truth and complexity of these characters—sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious—are made rich with the prosody that good poetry can bring. There’s not a more authentic and moving book written this year, because the speaker/poet becomes a kind of antihero, amazed at her own world, making every page a delight. The child, in one poem, says she wishes that someone would ask ‘How was your day?’ Well, Irene Fick, your day is magnificent!

 —Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate

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The Fragility of Winter is a book about life and “its precious, beautiful mess.” Author Irene Fick declares herself to be “the white space,” not as that all important tool so valuable to poetry, but rather as the placeholder of the spaces in our lives that include love, family, uneasy truces, loss. This is a book about kindness, to animals, to each other, even “Rachel from Cardholder Services,” who has a life beyond the telephone. The Fragility of Winter is an important book for our tumultuous times. A must read.

—Linda Blaskey, author of White Horses

 

 

Irene Fick’s The Fragility of Winter is the work of a writer who has come fully into her own, who does not flinch from critical self-assessment, who shares the joys and sorrows of memory—memories of family, failed relationships, and the daily grime and sometimes grimness of daily life, that part of life which is necessary to just getting by, those things which must be done between the writing of poems. Here also is a spark of hope, faith, an indefatigable sense that there will always be an upside, if one can just plug ahead, dig through the debris, the flotsam and jetsam of generations washed up on the shores of her life. Bravo! 

—Jamie Brown, publisher, The Broadkill River Press

 

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Irene Fick’s The Fragility of Winter is a splendid book. The poems come to us in the trappings of middle-class life, “black stretch pants/hair high and lacquered, lips painted a deep coral.” But the details—often conveyed with a wonderful sense of humor, sometimes a sense of the ridiculous—tell us something universal about the modest lives lived by all of us. Fick has a natural ability with metaphor, she speaks to us with spontaneous humanity. We join her in picking through the clothing left by a mother or aunt—“the slacks and shirts in shades of green, from chartreuse to shamrock”—and these articles lead us to consider the weight of our shared mortality.

—David Salner, author of Summer Words:

New and Selected Poems