Girl on a Bridge Reviewed in the Miami Herald!

A Sampling of Collections by Latinos, by Emma Trellas

Emma Trelles reviews poetry collections by Adrian Castro, Francisco Aragón, Brenda Cárdenas, John Murillo and yours truly in The Miami Herald.

• Girl on a Bridge. Suzanne Frischkorn. Main Street Rag. 57 pages. $14 in paper.

While the title of this collection might imply despair, the poems are filled with a fierce wit and rueful sort of grace. Frischkorn writes about the envies and adventures of family life, hers as a young woman trolling city streets with her sister or spying on her brother's forays into first pleasures. Later, as a mother and wife, the Cuban-American poet is almost combustible as she reveals how time has only fanned her longing -- for a way to tame her child's anger, for the sharply angled body of her youth. Even a short drive to a nearby bridge pulled ``taut over the Hudson River'' becomes an ode to desire. Frischkorn often writes in form, using sonnets and subtle rhyme schemes. Her language is elegant, but the heart behind it burns.

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And make sure to check out the accompanying story: Contemporary Latino Poets Mix it Up

``I think the way media is set up makes it very hard for readers to even find out about these books,'' says Don Share, senior editor of Poetry Magazine, which began publishing in 1912 and receives about 90,000 submissions a year. Share notes that his favorite book of 2009, the anthology The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, barely struck a blip on reviewers' radar. ``It was a marvelous book, a whole world of poetry from a country that's inaccessible to most people, but how much did you hear or read about it?''