Description:
The Beautiful Losses is full of stories, some very funny. Pollack sees reality as one thing, containing everything from lost loves to far stars, the deep past to secret fantasies.
Brief description: Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure (Story Line Press, 1986), and Happiness (Story Line Press, 1998), and two collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015) and Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). In print, Pollack's work has appeared in Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Manhattan Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Main Street Rag, Miramar, Chicago Quarterly Review, the Fish Anthology (Ireland), Poetry Quarterly Review, Magma (UK), Neon (UK), Orbis (UK), Armarolla, December, and elsewhere. Online, his poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Diagram, BlazeVox, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Big Pond Rumours (Canada), Misfit, and elsewhere. His poem "Shelter" won a Princemere Poetry Award in January 2020. Pollack lives in Washington, DC.
Review Quotes:
The Beautiful Losses is an unusually beautiful book, telling with wit, irony and occasional satire, stories that feel lived, advancing thematically towards a kind of goal. The stories are informed by a complex of loves - 'Our fridge, the size of love' is a generous fridge. The voices are often those of older people in conversation. Moving through the world they have memory, resentment, anger, but integrity, too, so they hang on to the possibility of rapport. They keep talking, and the end - even at the very end of the book - is not silence. Old age has a very different sensuality from what the young enjoy, and it is wonderful to find it here so intensely evoked, so that the reader lives it.
- Michael Schmidt, editor of Carcanet and PN Review, author of 15 books
Frederick Pollack is an American poetry treasure. He has written a huge amount, with an almost unparalleled dedication to poetry; The Beautiful Losses compiles poems from several collections. The world of Pollack's witnessing is often urban and somewhat sinister. Something or someone that may or may not be named is always lurking, even in the shadows of plain sight. It is a world where "An unmarked plane is an inside joke," and the point is neither pain nor information; "The point, ultimately, is procedure . . ." Pollack is an incomparable examiner of the procedures that govern human life, that make it at once beautiful and horrible. Walking through any cityscape with this American Original is itself a poetic act; and his work, I think, will outlive that of many more honored contemporaries.
- Robert McDowell, editor, publisher, author, and poet
The Beautiful Losses is a delight to read - the poems are brilliant, often wry and ironic, or humorous, with portrayals that are fearless and unforgiving. Pollack presents us with a complex world. He explores the personal and the public spheres, the emotional and the intellectual, and a prodigious range of themes: the culture wars and aesthetic values, power, international bureaucracies and their position papers, vaccines and infrastructure, "focus groups that never quite focus," time machines, love. He masters lofty themes, yet we get concrete details: of specks on an old mirror, he writes, "here an insect/ secreted or died, there a passing drink spattered." Pollack will infect you with his insatiable curiosity: where else will you find poems where you'll meet Zeno, Sophocles, Corelli, Viera da Silva, the Beat poets, William Corbett, Harold Bloom and his School of Resentment, Godzilla & King Kong, and engage intellectually with someone who says "my aim/ is to own and emasculate/ all gods."? The Beautiful Losses is poetry worth a second and third reading.
- Vinod Busjeet, author of Silent Winds, Dry Seas