Emily Kendal Frey is the author of Sorrow Arrow and the chapbooks Airport (Blue Hour, 2009), Frances (Poor Claudia, 2010), and The New Planet (Mindmade Books, 2010), as well as three chapbook collaborations. She won the Poetry Society of America’ s 2012 Norma Farber First Book Award for The Grief Performance and lives in Portland, Oregon. 

“Emily Kendal Frey’s The Grief Performance is a book that condenses a journey of finding and re-finding loss into beautiful packages. The packages are the poems and they sit shiny and new on every page of this fabulous and generous book. I want to go into the world that these poems create, just so that I can be given these terrifying presents again and again. I know you will, too. See you there.” –Dorothea Lasky

“Emily Kendal Frey’s poems are made of words that can fake out death, trick abandonment into a bed, turn love into hands. They are rich with sound, brave with secrets, funny, (tragic), and open ( ). She will twist up your heart into your next heart. Settle in. There are three dead people in her.” –Zachary Schomburg

“Emily Kendal Frey performs grief and dread as a graceful dance, the kind the tree you cut down in your backyard might do on your heart. This work is light, deft, dangerous. There are perfect poems here, such as ‘The End,’ which enacts a simple, startling twist on the hoary injunction to ‘Walk towards the light.’ See, everything you know is wrong. You really have to read this book.” –Rae Amrantrout

More Information:

The New Privacy

Bookslut

iO Poetry

The Rumpus

Sink Review