The Snow's Wife

The Snow’s Wife presents an unflinching examination of the final months of a marriage, ending with a spouse’s death. It explores the daily minutiae of caregiving, the tender and the distasteful, that lend startling poignancy and unbearable hardship— how these challenge even the most steadfast bonds between self and God, dismantling that spiritual partnership and re-creating a new one that seems at first a temporary refuge, but is later revealed to be sturdy and permanent. Lindsay’s poems investigate intimacy on trial in the face of loss.

The Snow’s Wife, released by CavanKerry in November 2020, is Frannie Lindsay’s sixth volume. Her others are If Mercy (The WordWorks, 2016); Our Vanishing (Red Hen, 2012); Mayweed (The WordWorks, 2010); Lamb, (Perugia, 2006); and Where She Always Was (Utah State University, 2004). Her honors include the Benjamin Saltman Award; the Washington Prize; the May Swenson Award; and The Missouri Review Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Lindsay’s work appears in the Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Field, Plume, and Best American Poetry.  She is a classical pianist and teaches workshops on grief and trauma.

From “In November, Everything Departs”

But behold, too,
the bosomy gloom of libraries. The lamps,
so earnest and adequate over the little desks.
I can bear to look as happiness fades
from its tedious season. I can endure

each vesper bell tonguing against
its brave lip; the thrill in words like reckon,
atone, and widow. How they are one another’s
encrypted siblings. The things they know.
The things they harken.

From “November on Fresh Pond”

But most of all I have loved
afternoons the color of found pennies

and dogs at home in the worlds
of only their names

and the lonely
tall and at peace with their shadows

everything seems to be holding hands
although it is nothing perhaps

but the light with great care
joining together the proper ends of things

From “After”

Someone prays
as the wind grabs bone specks
away from her palms. The wind
has other blowing to do.

Someone cries, and the months
don’t care. Someone tends
the plants and they bloom.
As if informed, the mail

stops. Then God appears
as a story, or as the breeze
where a story belongs:
you died

in your bed. We came.
We held your face. Summer
came too. We had to
allow her in.

Frannie Lindsay’s poems recall Tsvetayeva’s epistolary prose in which corporeality is freed from its external boundaries, embracing, instead, the transcendent where, as Tsvetayeva wrote, “a dream hand takes / Another hand’s dream.” The sleeper, Lindsay’s late husband, is guided back home. But the book extends beyond elegies to hard-hitting evocations. In a prayer for her rapist, Lindsay offers “I hope he has learned / to slink unnoticed across the nights’ / sad meadows, leaving the asters / alone in their clusters.” God, Lindsay beckons, is both “beloved and exiled . . . we can no longer / awaken even one star.” The Snow’s Wife is a remarkable book of unbroken, emphasized silences, of enduring heart and intuition: “The snow, had it been kind, / would fall again like old magnolia petals // loosening all at once when it was time.”
—Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Bad Harvest

PAST PRAISE FOR FRANNIE LINDSAY

Why, when Frannie Lindsay calls me to walk with her on the Way of the Cross, do I find myself saying yes, yes, thank you? Is it because her beautiful, pungent, sensual laments confirm that I’m not crazy, that the world is in fact as sad and full of grace as I thought? Is it because Lindsay has already written several fiercely lovely books of poems that are essential to me, such that now I will follow her voice absolutely anywhere? Yes, and yes, and thank you.

—Patrick Donnelly, author of Little-Known Operas

88 pages
Frannie Lindsay
Pub date – October 6, 2020
Trade paper – 6 X 9″
$18
ISBN 978-1-933880-81-5
Notable Voices – Poetry