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Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about his life to last him the rest of his days, so wrote Flannery O’Connor, words that are vitally embodied in Frazier’s AFTER, an unflinching yet tender look at “childhood . . . the kingdom where nobody dies.” Yet unlike Millay’s imaginary kingdom, here we find a world where parents and gods are fallible, innocents perish, and death lurks at each corner. Without turning away from these realities, Frazier illumines the darkest corners of memory, bearing apt witness to remembered experience with uncommon clarity and sureness, each poem a gem cut and polished to a fierce brightness. “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory,“ writes Louise Gluck in Nostos, lines which aptly preface Frazier’s elegant collection. But Frazier revisits childhood again and again through a true poet’s lens, seamlessly fusing his narrative and lyrical gifts. In poem after poem, he insists on uncovering the radiance buried beneath the questions, with words that live, breathe, and “lean like leaves toward light.”  

Angela Narciso Torres, Author of Blood Orange, Grand Prize Winner for Poetry, Willow Books