The Storytellers and Other Poems

The Storytellers and Other Poems is Thomas Frosch's fourth book of poetry. The poems are organized into several sections. "Journeys" includes a voyage to the childhood of the author's father on New York's Lower East Side, where, among other imaginary and real encounters, he is dispatched to get knishes for Freud and Jung, learns about horse thieves, and witnesses the accidental death of his sister. The section also includes a journey of tricksters from different times and cultures to a banquet; lunch orders of famous authors; and the tale of a detective on assignment in Disneyland. "Time Pieces" includes a series of short poems on the seasons and a variety of dramatic moments like a surprisingly peaceful gathering of different African animals at a desert well, a batter's getting hit by a pitch, and the sound of Covid ambulances on a perfect spring day. The first part of "Adaptations," "Pictures into Words," includes a narrative based on Douglas Anderson's "Desert Plain," which appears on the cover of this volume. The second part, "Words into Other Words," adapts passages by Dante, Chaucer, and Housman, and a beer commercial, and it also includes an updated, two-page version of Schnitzler's 1897 Reigen, in which the lovers communicate by cell phone. In "Storytellers" are various scenes of creativity, written, oral, and visual, including an author's call to a computer help line that turns into an encounter with a muse. Here too is the book's extended title poem that celebrates the small ceramic figurines known as Storytellers. "Close By and Far Away" tells of experiences that are distant in one way and inwardly resonant in another. Death is entertained by a woman who has no respect for him, and whom he comes to miss when she's gone; the famous poetic nightingales of Europe make a sudden appearance in sunshine on Long Island on an ideal day; and a bunch of seaweed makes its slow voyage to immortality in the Sargasso Sea. The poems in the final section, "Taking Care," concern taking care, or not, of others, of the environment, and, as in a poem about a saxophonist practicing in the park, of one's chosen work.

Author: Thomas Frosch

Publisher: Independently Published

Publication Date: May 06, 2021

Number of Pages: 184 pages

Binding: Paperback or Softback

ISBN-10: NA

ISBN-13: 9798722359070