paper • 80 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-935536-20-8
Winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize
“Ghosts”, from How The Losers Love What’s Lost:
Each of them missed his moment, felt it pass
like a body moving through an unlit room.
The grandfather clock clicks through the minutes, bangs
the hours, and they, in their old-fashioned hats
and dull black jackets, pace the upstairs halls,
practicing the words they should have said:
another Stop, another I’ll sober up.
And in their murky heads, they run through all
the cues they missed, the marks they didn’t hit.
Some times—on certain weeknights when it’s rained—
they gather in attics, unused nurseries,
and they rehearse like actors. Together, they sit
and thumb their scripts, dog-eared and yellow. The play
is titled Living, and it starts in the dark
with a knock on a heavy door. Then, a voice:
Darling, darling, I have something to say.
“George Eliot once remarked ‘that the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.’ In How the Losers Love What’s Lost, Patrick Ryan Frank has assembled an incredible array of speakers who are continually hurt into levels of awareness not available to the ‘well-wadded’ winners among us, levels of awareness that transform defeat into artful victories of unforgettable insight. While disappointment, deprivation, disconnection, and vulnerability provide the occasion for many of these poems, their underlying subject is human fallibility and the need for empathy in our dealings with each other and ourselves. This is a beautiful book, and Patrick Ryan Frank is one of the best young poets I’ve come across in many years.” —Alan Shapiro, judge, Four Way Books Intro Prize