About Frannie Lindsay
Frannie Lindsay has authored four previous poetry collections: Our Vanishing (Benjamin Saltman Award), Mayweed (The Washington Prize), Lamb (Perugia Prize), and Where She Always Was (May Swenson Award). Her work appears in Best American Poetry 2014. She is a previous winner of The Missouri Review Prize, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Praise for If Mercy
“Here is another sheaf of the blackest paper / set out for your stately, impoverished poems / feeling their way,” writes Frannie Lindsay. In If Mercy “impoverished” is synonymous with longing, “stately” is synonymous with magnanimous. Only “the blackest paper” could hold these haunted, prescient poems “feeling their way” through darkness to praise. Here praise is shaped by the fearlessness and fineness that constitute grace. Indeed, Frannie Lindsay’s astonishing poetry is synonymous with grace. Here is
a beautiful book from one of our very best contemporary poets.
—Terrence Hayes, author of How to Be Drawn
Frannie Lindsay’s elegant fifth collection is simultaneously elegiac and celebratory, a tribute to both “gone things” and the beautiful that remains. Her primary subjects are human, old and diminished and dying; but her expansive vision encompasses the animal and reaches toward the divine. Using haunting repetitions, extended sentences, and subtle transformations of a carefully observed natural world, Lindsay creates poems that are both grounded and ineffable. Like the weeping beech tree in the cycle of poems that closes the book, the collection will be, for the reader, a “shrine / of sorrow and comfort both.”
—Martha Collins, author of Admit One: An American Scrapbook
Why, when Frannie Lindsay calls me to walk with her on the way of the cross, do I find myself saying yes, yes, thank you? Is it because her beautiful, pungent, sensual laments confirm that I’m not crazy, that the world is in fact as sad and full of grace as I thought? Is it because Lindsay has already written several fiercely lovely books of poems that are essential to me, such that now I will follow her voice absolutely anywhere? Yes, and yes, and thank you.
—Patrick Donnelly, author of The Charge and Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin
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