About Fritz Ward
Fritz Ward is the author of the chapbook Doppelgänged and a recipient of the Cecil Hemley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Blackbird, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He lives just outside of Philadelphia and works at Swarthmore College.
Praise for Tsunami Diorama
With a really remarkable ear for the jazz of English and an equally remarkable eye for the image, Fritz Ward’s sexy Tsunami Diorama is a serious pleasure. On second thought, “pleasure” is a tame word for the vivid, syncopated, and urgent pace of this wildly imagined and written book.
—Lynn Emanuel, author of The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected
In the opening poem of Fritz Ward’s superb debut, he writes, “I’ve set this narrative to burn down your front door.” And burn it down he does. The joys of love, of marriage, of sex turn out to be—at the hands of Ward’s adept craftsmanship—omens of fear, of depravity, of existential terror. When you enter his poems, he blindfolds you and spins you around, and the room you thought you were in turns out to be anything but what you expected. And did I mention his delightfully impish fearlessness? A poem dedicated to Susan Mitchell that starts with, “Susan, if I had your ovaries, / I’d summon a homing pigeon //
to deliver the plague,” and ends with, “Susan, if I am God, / there are so many reasons // to worry” is a marvel of sinister achievement. If you like your verse spiked with a good dose of absinthe, you will love Tsunami Diorama.
—Henry Israeli, author of god’s breath hovering across the waters
In Tsunami Diorama, Fritz Ward has succeeded in writing us postcards—front and back—missives and letters teeming with disturbances, romance, the neurosis that is romance, and the romance of the Whitmanian multitudes found in oneself and others. I so adore his linguistic high jinks, his lyricism, and his heart, which is, in this tsunami of verse, his diorama of the living and the dead, what gives these poems their salt and their scale.
—Kathy Fagan, author of Sycamore
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