Suzanne Frischkorn
Red Paper Flower
Little Poem Press

Reviewer: Terri Brown-Davidson



Suzanne Frischkorn’s poems in Red Paper Flower are strikingly deceptive and represent, for me, the Stealth Bomber of feminism: through simple and uncluttered diction, through biting irony and subtle depths of darkness, these poems mean to strike their intellectual target and resonate in a reader's mind for months, maybe years. The poems are, indeed, so subtle that it’s possible to read them at first with the sensation that one has experienced something, though one may remain uncertain what that "something" is for quite a while:

"Bee stings,"
he called
the bumps
under my t-shirt.
I had a crush
on Roger--
his blue eyes,
his blond hair.
That day
on my porch step
wrecked my posture for years.
("Bees")

Frischkorn’s poems are about women: dangerous women, sassy women, saucy women, depressed women, ravenous women; and any woman who can’t glimpse herself in these pages may not be seeking her own reflection assiduously enough. Also, these are poems with a simple surface level that contain risky sub-currents of darkness. It may even be that Frischkorn deliberately "unpacks" her poems, striving not for the more common poetic goals of a lavish sonicism and density, but craving a simple, clean narrative line to interfuse a range of magical and haunting facts with a frequently pointed sense of theme, as in "Bow Hunter," a piece reminiscent of Anne Sexton at her most "deliciously biting":

He stole my uterus.
The Medicaid doctor I mean.
Then he cut off my breasts
and sold them for half price
to Ed Gein who made my nipples
into a lamp switch.

My ex-husband knew Ed well,
but thought women
were more useful alive.
He locked me in a basement apartment
with a baby--both of us sick
with the Asian flu.
When he wanted sex
he pointed his bow and arrow at me--
but got the Eros role confused.
He made his own arrows
on the dining room table:
bright orange, neon green feathers,
balanced precision.

He woke at 3am, put on camouflage
clothes, and doused himself
with fox piss.
Climbed his tree stand and waited.
Those deer, they never had a chance.

The tonal swings in this poem between horror and humor, always deftly managed, are characteristic of Frischkorn’s work. She enjoys crafting a narrative situation that’s so simply presented any reader can understand it and then loading up the poem with references (such as the one here to Ed Gein, who was one of America’s "first psychopaths" and the model for the Norman Bates character in Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho) that add their own heft, ultimately spinning out from these offbeat references to embrace both the political and the personal. Her streamlined and uncluttered poetic surfaces disguise a remarkable level of craft; for example, clever direct rhymes ("mean" and "Gein") or lovely, almost invisible slants rhymes ("hair" and "years" from the poem "Bees"), techniques that reinforce content in a way that is both seamless and poetically impressive.

Frischkorn isn’t afraid of swimming in the murkier psychological depths, either, that her characters are prone to inhabit. A wonderful, highly experimental poem about Andrea Yates, "How Long Do You Think the Devil’s Been in Me?," explores the psyche of the Texas mother who drowned her children in the sparest terms imaginable, linking sections of dry reportorial and medical information to create an absolutely chilling effect:

On the morning of June 20th 36-year-old Andrea Yates,
a Texas mother of five, drowned all her children.
i.
asphyxia: {GK. asphuxia, stopping of the pulse: a-, without + sphuxis, heartbeat}

ii.
How to fill a tub: pull up stopper and/or plug drain
with stopper. Turn on faucet--five
seconds will pass before the roar of water bouncing
off tile & porcelain seems normal.
Adjust temperature to your liking: cold, hot, warm.
‘A bath in tepid water helps reduce a fever’--Dr. Spock


"A toddler can drown in two inches of water, never leave your child unattended"--
Parent’s Magazine.

iii.
1. Luke, 2 years old
2. Paul, 3 years old
3. John, 5 years old
4. Mary, 6 months old
"What’s wrong with Mary?" Noah Yates
5. Seven years old

iv.
You need to come home, she said to her husband.
Is anyone hurt?
Yes.
Who?
The children.
All of them?
Yes.

The oddest thing about this poem is that--from this almost-dusty assemblage of facts--the reader gleans some actual insight into who Andrea Yates was at the time of the crime, and the poem manages to heighten the reader’s sympathy for the murdered children, as well, simply by listing their names and ages at the time of their deaths.

In Frischkorn’s weaker poems, she seems to rely on a reader’s understanding of character that isn’t generated via the poem itself, and this is where her poetry occasionally falters: not in the sonic, rhythmic, or linguistic realm, but in that area where fictional and poetic technique necessarily intersect, as in "The Protester Buys Curtain Rods":

_____he pushes a chrome cart
through Bed, Bath & Beyond
slides it between Decorative

Housewares and discount bins.
Fluorescent lights and white
noise are not the same--

despite the fancy packaging.
There is nothing he doesn’t need.
The cart--too small to satisfy

the 48-inch rods--glints
in the aisle. Brass finials
spin a song--whirr whirr whirr.

As the sale girl walks by
he calls out
There is nothing I don’t need
but she has rounded the corner.

One of the flaws of this poem, I’d suggest, is that articulated need does not a character make. However, though this poem doesn’t represent one of Frischkorn’s more stellar aesthetic moments, the rest of the collection does. This is a chapbook to buy, to savor, to linger over, and to remember: poetically speaking, Suzanne Frischkorn is the real thing.