No Small Gift
Jennifer Franklin
Winner of the Beverly Hills Book Award for Poetry, a winner of the 2019 Best Book of Poetry from Pinnacle Awards, and a New York Big Book Award 2019 Distinguished Favorite.
Centered on the theme of regaining a voice, the collection manifests poetry’s power to distill meaning from the chaos of trauma.
Grave illness, profound disability, and stunning cruelty and betrayal are Franklin’s catalysts in No Small Gift: turning the chaos of her trauma into meaning, rediscovering a voice embedded under sutures and scars, making a whole from rent parts. Unflinching biographical details intersect with fictional and historical figures–the mythological personae of Philomela and Lavinia, Vermeer’s tronies and Rodin’s lovers, children killed in the Nazi’s euthanasia program, and other mute victims of abuse and neglect and eyewitness to horror–to animate a collection that proves “every song of grief is still song.”
“First Love” from No Small Gift
is not you but he
is familiar in all
the important ways.
I pass through life
finding you over
and over again—
oppress you
with love. And
every surrogate?
Afflicted by my
kindness, they leave
me with my music.
I loved you before
I ever loved you.