CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of numerous poetry collections, including Ecodeviance (2014), While Standing in Line for Death (2017) and Amanda Paradise- Resurrect Extinct Vibration (2021). They have received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, a Believer Magazine Book Award and a Gil Ott Book Award. They regularly teach at Columbia University in New York City and at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Their Selected (Soma)tics will be published by Penguin in 2023.
I've heard it said that The Book of Frank is this generation's Dream Songs, but I think The Book of Frank surges ahead in experiment and lasting power -- Maggie Nelson, author of THE ARGONAUTS This is not merely a desert island book, but a book for a desert world. The Book of Frank lilts through the strangeness, brutality, and beauty of our often terrible age. These are unsparing poems, and it has been a gift to be sweetly wrecked by them again and again, never quite knowing whether to meet the mythic Frank with laughter or with tears -- Anne Boyer, author of THE UNDYING CAConrad's The Book of Frank enters like a Dixie tornado of nightmare surreality, the trash of USA demon seed consciousness assaulting the senses. CA's magic is his poetics, the transference of rotten hearts into crystal intellect, angel dreams, rhythms seeking love, and locating it in the essence of ritual and language. The Book of Frank is a contemporary masterpiece of radical prose in which the writer's soul sings across the page, rising above the indignities of Earthbound chaos, where humor and horror dance to the beat of the living dead -- Thurston Moore I can never have enough CAConrad, like paprika or wisdom in disguise. Is he the Frank of the book? -- Bernadette Mayer, author of MEMORY