A Small Rising Up in the Lungs

"In A Small Rising Up in the Lungs, language shimmers at the heart of all things. Kit Frick uses the page like a canvas, spacing words so the reader is made aware of both space and time. A Small Rising Up in the Lungs is a stunning meditation on the act of seeing, being, and this perilously fleeting thing we call life."

-- Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of My Life as a Silent Movie and the Alex Award-winning Space: A Memoir

"In A Small Rising Up in the Lungs, Kit Frick journeys, over land and sea, through silence and doubt, the destination always receding further into the distance. Always, in these poems, Frick's language is luminous and spare; here, danger shimmers beautifully just below the surface. 'In this place we define things, ' Frick writes, 'in terms of absence, ' and still these poems are insistent in their strength, in their presence."

-- Brittany Cavallaro, New York Times bestselling author of the Charlotte Holmes series and Girl-King

"Wallace Stevens called it 'a curious puffing.' Kit Frick calls it A Small Rising Up in the Lungs. Both speak to the modest, insistent, and inquisitive utterance that wants nothing less than to 'unvex' the world. Frick maps the topography and digs into the cultural anthropology of our time. She uncovers a place inhabited by laconic, wanting, shuffling, axe-wielding, cruel, lonely men 'sick with urgency' who 'manufacture nostalgia' as they prepare for disaster. They want answers. They can't abide laws. I recognize these men, don't you? This uncanny, bright first book is a 'minor adjustment' that calls for an exceedingly large revision to what we thought we knew."

-- Bruce Smith, author of the William Carlos Williams Award-winning Devotions and The Other Lover, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize

"Kit Frick is a poet whose ear is tuned to the fine and particular. Her spare lines and muscular syntax build a troublesome dream of the American West that leaves us uneasily suspended between mystery and threat."

-- Rebecca Hazelton, author of Fair Copy and Vow