"Fire in the Doll's House"
from Frances Brent's
The Beautiful Lesson of the I

Frances Brent:

Frances Brent was born in Chicago and was educated at Barnard College. She studied poetry at Columbia University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. She has taught courses at Yale, Loyola University, Northwestern University, and Barat College. From 1984 to 1991 she co-edited the literary journal, Formations. In 1987 she co-translated Beyond the Limit, Poems by Irina Ratushinskaya. She lives with her family in New Haven.

About The Beautiful Lesson of the I:

2005 May Swenson Poetry Award

"The rightness and precision in poem after poem correspond to the quiet authority of a voice that issues from painstaking observation, not from improvisation or anecdote. May Swenson would have admired and enjoyed this collection – as I do."
— Rachel Hadas, judge of the 2005 Swenson Award

Frances Brent's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Notre Dame Review, Yale Review, and in many other journals. Her work is known for its delicacy and detail, evoking both the Symbolists and some of the Asian poets who inspired them. She includes May Swenson among her influences, too; like Swenson, Brent often steadies her gaze on the material world, delighting in its humor as well as its occasional horror.

The Beautiful Lesson of the I is a collection of finely made poems by an accomplished poet. It will reward the scholar and the student of poetry, as well as the reader looking for the simple pleasures of poetic insight authentically felt.

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