Kathleen Fraser’s numerous books include il cuore / the heart: Selected Poems 1970–1995 (Wesleyan University Press), When New
Time Folds Up (Chax Press), Discrete Categories Forced Into Coupling (Apogee Press), and her collected essays, Translating the
Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (University of Alabama Press). During her tenure as Director of the Poetry Center
at San Francisco State University, she founded the American Poetry Archives. From 1983 through 1991, she co-published and co-edited
the groundbreaking journal HOW(ever), focused on innovative/exploratory work by English-language women poets. In 1997, she initiated
its more recent electronic version How2. Kathleen Fraser currently divides her time between San Francisco and Rome, and is at work on
a translation of the book Le api migratori by the young Italian poet Andrea Raos.

“The signal ambit of Kathleen Fraser’s remarkable poetic career has encompassed the feminist concern with exclusion, marginality and the
generation of ‘voice,’ as well as the poststructuralist intrigue surrounding the construction of the self through language. Throughout, she
has reveled in the liberating play of words themselves. Fraser’s devotion to discovery, her willingness to risk, and her profoundly lyrical sense
of the intimate place her not only among our most daring poetic innovators, but also mark her as one of the pre-emiment poets of the
past thirty years.” –Patrick Pritchett

"re:searches

(fragments after Anakreon)

inside
(jittery
burned language)
the black container
*
white bowl, strawberries
perfumy from sun
two spoons xxxxxxxxtwo women
deferred pleasure
*
piousxxxxxxxx impious
reason could not take
precedence
*
latent content
extant context
*
"eee wah yeh
my little owlet"
not connected up
your lit-up exit
*
just picked -
this red tumbling mound
in the bowl
this fact and its arrangement
this idea and who
determines it
*
this strawberry is
what separates her tongue
from just reptition
*
the fact of her
will last only
as long as she continues
releasing the shutter, she thinks
*
her toes are not
the edible boys'
toes Bernini carved,
more articulate
and pink in that gray
marble
*
his apprentice finished off
the wingy stone
splashing feathers from each
angel's shoulder but
Bernini, himself,
did the toes, ten-
der gamberoni,
prawnha, edible and
buttery under
the pink flame
*
this is what you looked like at ten,
held for an instant,
absorbed by the deep ruffle
and the black patent
shine of
your shoes
*
lying with one knee up
or sitting straight (yearning)
as if that yellow towel
could save you (some music about to hear you)
*
beside the spread narrow surface, the
yellow terra
firma, the blue wave
longing to be her own
future sedative,
no blemish,
blond
*
wounded sideways,
wound up as if
disqualified
*
externally, E-
ternal city,
sitting xxxxxxxx hereafter,
laughter
*
her separate person-
ality, her
father's neutrality
ity
*
equilibrium
(cut her name
out of every
scribble)
hymn xxxxxxxx himnal now, equal-
lateral
*
pronounced with
partially closed
lips
*
pink pearl eraser
erasing her face her
eee face ment
her face meant
*
he cut out
of her, her name
of each thing
she sang
each letter she
hung, on line
(divine)
*
this above
all to be who,
be nature's two,
and though heart
be pound-
ing at door,
cloud xxxxxxxx cuckoo
*
radial activ-
ity, who cow now,
who moo
*
not random, these
crystalline structures, these
non-reversible orders, this
camera forming tendencies, this
edge of greater length, this
lyric forever error, this
something embarrassingly clear, this
language we come up against

from Notes Preceeding Trust, 1987