About the Book
Frame Inside a Frame by Daniel Lassell explores the boundaries, overlaps, and portals of memory and seeking. Lassell’s collection is wildly surprising at every turn, greeting readers with visceral childhood memories, gritty landscapes of climate collapse, a quirky neighbor transfixed on love, a sexual predator who breaks into homes, a bat that disrupts sleep, a llama that bites off a man’s ear, a dog that eats the family’s Thanksgiving turkey, farmers condemning their machinery to rot in fields, a cow carcass that washes up on a city’s waterfront park, a hooligan feeding possums trash, and pollen everywhere. Taken together, Frame Inside a Frame is a constellation eyed toward the exploration of distance and meanings inherent within distance and proximity.
About the Author :
Daniel Lassell is the author of Spit, winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, Ad Spot and The Emptying Earth. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Arkansas International, Colorado Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. Raised in Kentucky, he now lives in Bloomington, Indiana.
Review :
“Whether dealing with climate change, an unsettling encounter with a bat trapped indoors, or the larger questions of what it means to inhabit a body, Daniel Lassell’s second full-length collection, Frame Inside a Frame, refuses to succumb to the temptation of pat answers or easy binaries. Using the concept of picture frames, the poet explores his subjects from multiple perspectives, aiming for an understanding that leads, not to Utopia, ‘but a room next to it.’ Lassell is a poet of generous intellect who employs an admirable economy of words to explore a world where grief is ‘more commonplace than joy,’ and we are caught ‘between question and haunt.’”
- Frank Paino, author of Dark Octaves and Obscura
“Daniel Lassell’s Frame Inside a Frame is a book about looking from various vantage points and perspectives across distance and time. In Lassell’s gentle and capable hands, an aperture closes and opens like the valves of an alive and beating heart. I am grateful for all that courses through this collection: the wild and farm animals, the micro-moments of satisfaction and pleasure, and the indelible landscapes of Lassell’s singular, poetic life.” - Ama Codjoe, author of Bluest Nude
“What delights this gallery of poetic frames offers, leading us through the labyrinths of time and memory! Reading these poems is like following some Kentucky Dante through the hinterlands and, ultimately, down into the underworld to eavesdrop on the murmuring there. But what elevates this collection into the quietly sublime is the poetic voice of Daniel Lassell—direct, honest, revelatory—a humble witness to the beauty and the carnage of our times. I hope readers enjoy this fine collection as much as I have.”
- David Shumate, author of Kimonos in the Closet and The Floating Bridge
“Daniel Lassell’s electrifying second collection sits us in the middle of nature and asks us to imagine how fragile life and its creation can be. No matter how hard we try to protect our children or ourselves, it ‘Doesn’t matter. In the end, the hardened object is a fragile object—like the body, the earth.’ Lassell works to build formal frames within these poems, borders not only to protect his loves but to understand them and himself. We are guided through snapshots of childhood and divinity, mercy and marriage, of a ‘small dog / yapping / yapping / into hoisted sky’ and how we take for granted what can be so easily taken from us.” - Jason B. Crawford, author of YEET! and Year of the Unicorn Kidz
“Frame Inside a Frame is a kaleidoscopic chorus of devoted wonder. Through poems that brilliantly intensify the relentless echo and honesty of multiple perspectives, Daniel Lassell draws a faithful attention to the fragility and the fierceness of what connects us, to the forces that might leaven or level our capacity for feeling found. Bless this book.” - Geffrey Davis, author of One Wild Word Away and Night Angler
“Remarkably intimate and complex, Frame Inside a Frame is a gift to read—and reread. Traversing the landscape of these poems, I find myself intellectually and emotionally moved, returning again and again to their sites of transformation, their intricate interrogations of what it means to be. Each poem is ‘like a resurrected body’ on the page, another ‘doorway in those woods’ that opens to deepen our understanding of the world, and our complicated place in it. Lassell has written a multifaceted gem of a book.” - Sara Eliza Johnson, author of Vapor and Bone Map
“Daniel Lassell is a master of subtraction, of what he calls a loosening joy. The poems here are filled with song, prayer, and silence. Restless and reflective, they shift and rub against the natural world, its vastness and its granularity, with striking precision and clarity. Here, a world accumulates even as it is undone—wreckage and reverence inexorably intertwined.” - Richard Siken, author of I Do Know Some Things, War of the Foxes, and Crush
