What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

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"I don't believe in tame poetry. . . . Poetry busts guts." —Frank Stanford

The poetry publishing event of the season, this six-hundred-plus page book highlights the arc of Frank Stanford's all-too-brief and incandescently brilliant career.

Despite critical praise and near-mythic status as a poet, Frank Stanford's oeuvre has never fully been unified. The mystery and legend surrounding his life—and his suicide before the age of thirty—has made it nearly impossible to fully and accurately celebrate his body of work. Until now.

This welcome and necessary volume includes hundreds of previously unpublished poems, a short story, an interview, and is richly illustrated with draft poems, photographs, and odd ephemera.

As Dean Young writes in the Foreword to the book: "Many of these poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood in river mud... Frank Stanford, demonically prolific, approaches the poem not as an exercise of rhetoric or a puzzle of signifiers but as a man 'looking for his own tongue' in a knife-fight with a ghost."

When It's After Dark

I steal
all the light bulbs
and hide them like eggs
in a basket
going to some outlaw
I put on the best I can find
I cover them with a swatch
of something
that swells like a bite
that bleeds green
cloth that smells
of a feed store
but looks
to of been worn
I go over to nasty willy's bridge
and throw them into the creek
there in the shade I listen
for them
to make nests to escape
agony and burst