Journey Beyond the Ordinary with My Books and New Releases

With his fourth full-length collection, Marc Frazier has provided us with “a design for living.” In a world that is quick to destabilize subjective experience, Frazier creates a second world of dramatized human experience by weaving personal history with artistic ancestry. Part meditation and part ekphrastic, Frazier has collaged a mixtape of wonder and wonderment. If “the loneliness inside you is deeper than the sea,” then this book is a salve. Through conversation with other poets, painters, film makers, and musicians, Frazier proves that poetry and art are explorations of lineage and their enduring influence echoes up from the past into the present to direct and console us.

Each Thing Touches turns static memories into a kaleidoscope of living images, transformed by Frazier’s pen into faceted bursts of color and light that are at once worldly and alien. With a flash, a woman arranging carnations on Rush Street in Chicago becomes a clown pulling flowers at the circus. The life of a Midwestern family is juxtaposed against a Japanese woman receiving facial reconstruction after Hiroshima. Slices of life are pulled from the memory of the poet, and add to a collective human experience that illuminates the hidden intricacies and beauty in life. Frazier’s poetry is an aesthetic pleasure. His collection makes human history an emotionally resonant journey that readers will want to experience again and again.

— Angela Narciso Torres

“Frazier illumines the darkest corners of memory, bearing apt witness to remembered experience with uncommon clarity and sureness, each poem a gem cut and polished to a fierce brightness. In poem after poem, he insists on uncovering the radiance buried beneath the questions, with words that live, breathe, and “lean like leaves toward light.”