Tonight a conversation with poet, Jennifer Franklin, about her newest book: No Small Gift. December 6, 2018.

 

There is no evading Franklin’s forceful mastery of language. With her deft precision, sharp as a surgeon’s knife, she constructs gorgeous songs from the blinding heaps of tragedy, alchemically transforming brutality into music, both soothing and beautiful. This is her weapon, her force field, and her calling as she writes in ‘Another School:’ ‘If only I could calm their bodies that / cannot keep still—tell them that I too / drown the silences of this world with my / own song.”

Poet Cynthia Cruz commenting on Jennifer Franklin’s No Small Gift

I’ve always said I’m not a poet but a storyteller who sometimes finds the best way to tell a particular story is through poetry.

Jennifer, on the other hand is a poet, through and through, as well as a storyteller. As the poet Marchant writes about Jennifer’s work:

‘Every song of grief,” writes Jennifer Franklin, ‘ is still song.’ Where does the impulse to such a song come from? What enables the poet to transform her portion of woe into language that is kin to what a bird at dawn might sing?

Tune in tonight at 7pm at our website CosmosFM.org or on the radio at WNYE, 91.5 or use the TUNEIN app on your smart device.

Click here for a brief biography.

Click here for more information about No Small Gift published by Four Way Books.

 

Click here for more information about Jennifer’s earlier book Looming.

Click here for more information about Hudson Valley Writers Center.

Click here for more information Slapering Hol Press.

Click here for more information Philomela.