Award-winning chapbook

My chapbook, In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking, was selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the Frontier Poetry Digital Chapbook Contest. Here’s the announcement from fall 2020:

SELECTED BY CARL PHILLIPS: In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking by Frederick Speers

“Cast as a contemporary breviary, a book of months and hours, In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking takes the measure of a life made more urgent by the mortality that looms close to and over it. The urgency seems to generate a new form on the page, which makes the reading process an especially athletic one, as the words move “up and down the quiet median” of the line itself, suggestive both of how precarious any life can be, and how quickly we slip in and out of health and illness, yes, but also how easily sex moves in and out of

“happiness  

& sorrow,”

between “the notes     & the

            strummed   silences”

And yet there remains a sturdy generosity throughout. Here, says the poet, Take

   “my un-

         petalled hope”

offering it as a gift to the reader, for

“others to lift        enough        in time”

         up, high          & freely

Life is nothing if not uncertain. The poems here reflect that, and make of uncertainty a new song.”

—Carl Phillips, Guest Judge

PRAISE FOR IN THE YEAR OF OUR MAKING & UNMAKING

“A spartan prosody resembling the brief notations on a calendar forms the foundation of this suite of poems composed inside enormous silences: flowers isolated in fields, the bare spots around them saying so much about living, thriving, surviving: ‘knowing/ better—// & yet,/ every day,// daring to/ step outside’.” –D. A. Powell

“Written in a series of cells that are reminiscent of the cells of days, and the larger field of the month as time amounts across a cycle of reckoning, the poems In The Year of Our Making & Unmaking are subtly evocative of space, and movement, specifically of the archaic notion of rhythm that is not a regular measure or dance, but rather improvised, and provisional shapes we’re able to compose out of and against the overall (and overwhelming) flow of bodies in the world. The visual prosody of the poems opens up our reading through this elsewhere rhythm: ‘On some / plateau // in the / distance // the universe // is a flower,’ is not exactly a gesture the poem literally holds if we’re playing by the rules, reading left to right, top to bottom; it is, however, one of many such constellations, epiphanies of language & image that this book makes possible for the reader to alight upon and experience as a momentary freedom, a heaven in a wild flower.” –Jeffrey Pethybridge

“Friends, read this slim wonder of a book. Urgent, moving, and restlessly inventive, In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking is both an accounting of and reckoning with mortality, beauty, and love. Frederick Speers constructs a physical body for time itself—a body that breathes, breaks, thrives, and passes right before our eyes in the shapes the poems make on the page. Elegies, love songs, and pastorals find new incarnations in Speers’ hands. This is a book to brand our hearts, dazzle our minds, and refresh our sense of what a poem can be.” –Kirun Kapur

“Even more resonant upon a year of immutable losses, In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking is a meditation on the limits of the human body: the distance between us—void of human contact, in a field of buildings—where only the sea is heard ‘echoing the sky.’ It is in the natural world that we find solace, in the company of ‘the wildflowers/ with their different, if somewhat repetitive play/ up & down the quiet median.’ Another day in quarantine, now made clearer by the absence of human interaction, where the memory of each other makes the next moment possible. Speers perceives a world that is dark yet made meaningful through memory.” –Ruben Quesada

“Speers’ poems take place in a time that’s circular and layered, offering us ‘old and new ways of being.’ Months are blue, receptive, spilling one into the next, thin skinned. Months may make promises that outline failure, or refuse to play the field, or visit old haunts. Hours chart everything from moral failings to a Black-capped chickadee at the bird-feeder. Moving deftly from fear and sorrow to vast, blooming hope, Speers makes music and sense of an inimitable version of our world, one we are making even as it makes us. One ‘making me feel/ like all you’ve/ made in the field,/ a flower feeling I’ve made.’ This collection is wild with life.” –Rachel DeWoskin

Read an interview with the poet on how “In the Year of Our Making and Unmaking” came about.

My first Small* Book of poems

So Far Afield (first published by Nomadic Press in 2017, and now with Black Lawrence Press) is a poetic study into the queer nature of love among men—a gay love that’s been called contra naturam—by tracing their wild desires, spiritual connections, and unspoken encounters, from seaside to cemetery. My first small book of poems incorporates classical lyric forms with a contemporary elliptical style to create new narratives about our old world—a world that keeps on falling in love, even as it’s falling apart. Available for purchase, through Small Press Distributors.

* “Small book” = chapbook. It’s longer than most chapbooks at 44 pages of poetry, but it’s still smaller than a full-length collection, which is 48 pages of poetry.

Praise for So Far Afield

Get your copy today

You can also Listen to some of the poems found in this book, read aloud by the poet.

Literary awards

So Far Afield was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in the category of gay poetry in 2018.

30th Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalists

One of my newer poems was recently selected by Keetje Kuipers as the winner of the 2020 Crab Creek Poetry Review Contest. Here’s that announcement:

—

Congratulations to the winner of this year’s contest, Frederick Speers, for his poem, "Whispering with You in the Early Hours."

Keetji Kuipers selected this poem, saying: Sometimes I think that reading a new poem is like participating in a taste test. I’m blindfolded and asked, “Is this made with real sugar or fake, with cherry juice or cherry flavoring?” It’s about identifying the authentic, the true. And the most true is a poem that risks itself, that steps out onto the dance floor and spins, perhaps imperfectly, to its own wild music. “Whispering with You in the Early Hours” risks sentiment and self-indulgence, and comes out the other side full of real, true feeling. This poem is the mysterious stranger at the party the poet describes: I want them to sidle up to me and whisper all the secrets of their heart, this world.

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I am also proud to be a past recipient of the first annual John Fitzpatrick Henry David Thoreau Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, which is given to poets who “focus on nature in all its many facets.” VSC provides a much needed haven for writers, and I am ever-grateful for their community.

ReadingS & Panels  

Tannery Series (Boston Area)

Dactyl Foundation (NYC)

Nomadic Press (Oakland)

Mass Poetry Festival (2018)

New Hampshire Poetry Festival (2018)

Association of Writers and Writing Programs (2020/2021)

poems published

Support artists and small publishers today by getting your physical copy of the book, SO FAR AFIELD. Although it’s available on Amazon, please buy your copy directly from Black Lawrence Press.