Nostalgia Resides in the Marrow, poetry by William W. Fraker

PRLog (Press Release) - Oct. 20, 2012 - Simple, brilliant, engrossing, the book connects one, root and branch, to the essence of the phenomenon of nostalgia and the Being from whence it arrives. It didn't feel like reading, it felt like dreaming.”

~Brent Potter, Ph.D., LMHC, CMHS, MMHS, Adjunct Instructor at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, Director of the R.D. Laing Institute, and an Editorial Member of the journal Janus Head.

About the book:

Because William Fraker writes about what binds us together in Nostalgia Resides in the Marrow, it’s notable that so many of these direct, accessible poems emerge against a backdrop of division: division of ancient loyalties to the Union and the Confederate South, division between ascendant human beings and retreating animals, division between foreign soil and what remains of home. Yet bonds of blood, memory, and most of all sympathy reconcile or at least ameliorate enduring conflicts. The titled “nostalgia” that animates these poems is thus complex, sometimes commemorative, sometimes remorseful, but always honest and relentlessly authentic. Most powerful of these poems, perhaps, are those in which crisis emerges to challenge an assumed continuity, such as those in which “years of waves no longer connect to a tide.” It’s appropriate that poems in this volume are themselves linked one to another, and they might best be read in succession in order to hear how the voice of this volume is so much more than that of the “suburban grandson.”

~Randall Stiffler, Ph.D., Lecturer, Department of English, Tufts University

“William Fraker's poems transport us across time to deliver unto the reader a rich idea of place: the shifting history and soul of Richmond and its surrounding area. Anyone interested in this part of Virginia will find these poems a pleasure to read and re-read.”

~Casey Clabough, Literature Editor of Encyclopedia Virginia and General Editor of the James Dickey Review

“These poems smell of earth newly turned. They carry the roughness of labor, the sad sweetness of long ago loss, and the fearlessness of memory graced with forgiveness. You won’t find the thum-rum-tum sound experiments or imagic thesauri of the current school poets. You will find sensual immediacy and apprehension of things easily overlooked without poets such as Fraker.”  

~Gordon Jack Schultz, Adjunct Professor of Aesthetics at Mount Ida College

William Fraker received a BA from Lynchburg College before earning graduate degrees from Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He taught in the department of inpatient psychiatry at Duke University and in the MSW program at Virginia Commonwealth University.  He has poetry in several on-line journals and contributed to Muscadine Lines: A Southern Anthology (KHR Ventures, 2006).  He is a member of the Midlothian Writers’ Workshop and lives near Richmond, VA.


To order:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/william-w-fraker/nostalgia-resid...

Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/12004693/1