Book Review :: Whipsaw by Suzanne Frischkorn
In her fourth collection, Whipsaw, Suzanne Frischkorn brings necessary attention to the profound vulnerabilities and strengths of women and girls in a dangerous “American landscape.” With “keys between … fingers in a parking lot,” Frischkorn’s poems confront male violence against females, and they indict a “sex-trafficker pedophile,” “frat boys [who] pick off freshmen girls,” and physical, sexual, and emotional forms of family and intimate partner abuse. In this landscape, “it’s all dire.”
Frischkorn’s speaker tells us she is daughter of a father who “tried to drown [her] in his bottle of sorrows” and a mother who “had no stint of empathy / for any living thing.” Under these circumstances, a reader may wonder, as one poem does, “what did sorrow ever do?” These poems assert that sorrow can prompt honest expression, different choices, and foster change. The daughter’s “greatest // achievement was to shatter / the dysfunction [of her] parents.”
Bad things happen to girls and women in the forest, but not in these poems. “This is not a fairy tale.” Hurrah! Instead, the forest offers “detail of light and shade,” where our speaker takes solace among trees, and where “Like Thoreau alone // in the distant woods [she] come[s] to her[self].”
Out of that recovery comes a desire “to pay tribute to the promise / of the future” which requires allegiance to both the “ancestral forest” and the next generation. Here is a poet who fights for her freedom, protests “deforest, // to develop,” and strives to be the “kind / of mother— / to gift [her] child / endurance and steady pace.”
In Whipsaw, Suzanne Frischkorn uses language to cut in two ways—beyond the imperiled and “beyond the veil.”
Whipsaw by Suzanne Frischkorn. Anhinga Press, April 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
