Our daily lives are prose, but in memory, each transcendent, startling, or ecstatic event, is rendered always as the most poignant, deathless poetry. That’s the premise behind Alphabet Soup: It is 26 letters—each titled after a letter of the alphabet—addressed to hereby anonymous persons who had an outsize influence—positive and/or negative—upon poet A. Gregory Frankson. As he considers mentors, lovers, ‘frenemies,’ and tutors, Frankson says, of one, “One day I hope to be s fortunate to find myself set ablaze with comparable fire”; about another, the poet says, “As a minor, I learned from you what little I gathered of the exoskeletal nature of masculinity;” of yet another formative associate, the author says, “Dear shadow, there can be no turning back.” The verve of these prose poems—“Vocabulary … catch[ing] up with experience”—recalls the incendiary scintillation of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, two scribes also alluringly Latinate, also scathingly forensic. Dear reader, come, dip your spoon in this Alphabet Soup, for there is “a modern hunger for these stories, the ones that speak to our beauty beyond your colour…."
George Elliott Clarke, Author of Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness and J’Accuse…!
The verve of these prose poems recalls the incendiary scintillation of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, two scribes also alluringly Latinate, also scathingly forensic.
George Elliott Clarke, author of Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness
At once experimental literature and alchemical apparatus — designed to take all the flavours of one man’s life experiences and transform them into something that nourishes.
Andrea Thompson, author of A Selected History of Soul Speak
For fans of memoirs that blend deep emotion with literary artistry, Alphabet Soup is a must-read.
Lalaa Comrie, thisblackgirlreads.ca