Our 2020 Chapbook Winner Debuts Now!

Frederick Speer’s IN THE YEAR OF OUR MAKING & UNMAKING invites the reader into an experience as wide, and as mystical, as the blue sky. The search for love, for the lover, for the self, for friends—the book makes what is universal incredibly individual and incredibly compelling, like all good mystic expression, and does so through a unique and innovative form that challenges the reader to stop, ponder, and discover its unique rhythm. There’s thunder, there’s the sweet relief of gentle rain, there’s the Good making faces in the clouds. For a book inspired by the calendar of a year, ITYOOM&U expresses a deep urge to create its own structure, its own intuitive sense of time, and inspires in readers just the same sweet realization of how to MAKE a life: “if it is to mean / anything in the thrilling / dark, it must be, / my friends, / that this desire, / unloosed, will be, / you, you…”

 

ABOUT the AUTHOR

Frederick Speers (he/him) is the author of So Far Afield (Nomadic Press), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI (Online); Crab Creek Review, winner of the 2020 poetry contest, selected by Keetje Kuiper; Diode Poetry Journal; Forklift, Ohio; Impossible Archetype; Ofi Press Magazine; Tahoma Literary Review; Portland Review; The Straddler; Salamander Magazine; and Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly. He lives outside Denver, Colorado with his husband and their three dogs.