Gunpowder Press is honored to publish Frangible Operas by Susan Kelly-DeWitt, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her 2022 collection, Gatherers’ Alphabet, was the inaugural title in the Gunpowder Press California Poets Series. Available at Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and elsewhere.
“‘Tonight the bells of the flowers ring out,’ begins the title poem in Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s exquisite new collection, and you will want to stop and listen. Frangible Operas is a book of honed astonishments. I love the way each line pays attention and makes you attend, the way each poem lets you breathe before its ending takes away your breath. When Kelly-DeWitt describes a woman’s arms in a painting by Raphael as forming ‘a perfect basketry,’ she might as well be describing her own poems and the impeccably artful way they contain whole worlds.”
— Susan Cohen, author of Democracy of Fire
“The diversity of forms and subjects in Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s Frangible Operas is breathtaking. With grace, precision, insight, and care, she engages nearly every aspect of our world—the political, the natural, the theoretical, the familial, the theological, the personal. One section of the book is devoted entirely to poems about works of art, ranging from Rembrandt to Diane Arbus—a fitting metaphor for the expansive reach of her vision. These poems may span over four decades of writing, but the poems of Frangible Operas will hold their notes for as long as we are singing.”
— Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry