A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival

This is a rare creation of song and scar, of vulnerability and both emotional and structural complexity. In Kirkpatrick-Vrenios' new collection Concerto for an Empty Frame, the outer and inner, conceptual and human worlds mingle in accessible yet complex ways. Brimming with meditations on family, biology, mathematics, landscape, and personal identity, all woven through the language of classical music, these vibrant poems remain grounded in a universal familiarity that opens us up to something greater. If one of the aims of poetry is to condense our vast, contradictory, and beautifully human world into the briefest of songs, Concerto for an Empty Frame stands as a testament to its possibility.

--John Sibley Williams, author of Skyscape



I had the privilege of being present during the birth of Vrenios' brilliant new book of poems, Concerto for an Empty Frame, and what a magical birth! Elizabeth melds these gorgeous poems into a concerto (using her considerable musical prowess) and is a woman on fire-a maestro at work. You can feel her passion singing through each movement of a heroine's journey, a modern quest we embark on in a white Valiant after the opera. With poems "Con fuoco," "Furioso," and "Lacrimoso," Vrenios deftly guides us through the initiation stage of this epic, to our heroine's darkest nights of the soul-the shock and grief of a son lost to the tragic bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and ultimately, to our heroine's homecoming. I emerged, blinking at the return of light, forever changed. Avanti! Avanti!

--Kim Noriega, author of Name Me



Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios' new poetry collection is like listening to a powerful concerto by Mozart or Beethoven presented in the form of a musical score, complete with Italian notation. Even her definitions are poems, such as her definition of "concerto:"

"Mus: One thousand yellow finches lift off a late summer river all at once."

The three movements of her concerto lead us through the breakup of her marriage, the loss of her son in a terrorist bombing, and finally a stepping away from grief, as "Blue startles the air open like an egg." Concerto for an Empty Frame is a brilliant work.

--Maureen Eppstein. Author of Horizon Line