A Shining Review for Gloria Frym’s Lies & More Lies

Written By Geoffrey Gatza


We are thrilled to share a brilliant and insightful review of Gloria Frym’s new book, Lies & More Lies (BlazeVOX, 2025), written by Alissa Hattman and published on April 29th. Gloria Frym is a literary force — poet, essayist, and thinker whose work has long challenged the complacencies of American culture. And while Lies & More Lies may have flown under the radar since its release, this review reminds us why Frym is one of the most vital and fearless writers working today.

Hattman’s review approaches Lies & More Lies with the keen attention and intellectual curiosity Frym’s prose demands. What emerges is a rich appreciation of Frym’s hybrid collection — a blend of flash fiction, satirical essay, poetic prose, and cultural critique. It’s a taxonomy of deception that captures the insidious presence of lies in every corner of contemporary life: political, personal, historical, and structural.

From the brutal truths of “War is Always a Lie” to the everyday deceptions in “Proper Working Order,” Frym offers a portrait of a world unmoored by duplicity. As Hattman puts it, “While lies vary in definition and scale, lying is insidious because it is the norm.” This truth — both despairing and urgent — beats at the heart of the collection.

Hattman makes sharp connections between Frym’s work and Hannah Arendt’s meditations on the political function of lying. Frym’s book resonates deeply with Arendt’s warning: that when people feel alienated, lies become not only persuasive, but foundational. Frym writes, “I personally began to lie like a thief whose very freedom depended on the narrative.” The results are chilling, but also darkly funny, cleverly structured, and delivered with Frym’s trademark incisiveness.

And yet, as Hattman notes, the collection isn’t just a catalog of corruption — it is also a call to clarity, to witness, to resistance. In the closing pages, Frym writes: “You air that serves me with breath to speak, we can’t breathe.” That line — echoing both Whitman and the call of Black Lives Matter — stops us in our tracks. It asks us not only to see the lie, but to reckon with its cost.

Alissa Hattman’s generous and perceptive review is a long-overdue recognition of Frym’s newest work. We hope it brings many more readers to this fierce and unforgettable book.

🔗 You can read the full review: https://www.smokelong.com/review-gloria-fryms-lies-more-lies/  
📘 Lies & More Lies is available now from https://www.blazevox.org/shop-1/p/lies-more-lies-by-gloria-frym  

Geoffrey Gatza

Bio Note: Geoffrey Gatza is the author of the poetry collections The House of Forgetting (2012), Apollo: A Conceptual Poem (2014), and A Dog Lost in the Brick City of Outlawed Trees (2018).

 

Divya Victor, in an article for poetryfoundation.org, said of Apollo: A Conceptual Poem “The diversity of these works echoes the complexities of the subject, but together they posit something specific, the heightened relationship between the interior self and the exterior world.”

 

Gatza’s poems have been published in anthologies, as well as magazines and journals including Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, The Pickled Body, Peach Mag, Tupelo Quarterly and various others. His play on Marcel Duchamp was staged in an art installation in Philadelphia and performed in NYC.

 

Gatza is an award-winning editor, publisher and poet. He is the driving force behind BlazeVOX, an independent press located in Buffalo, NY, specializing in innovative fictions and wide ranging fields of contemporary poetry. Geoffrey Gatza is lives in Kenmore, NY.

editor@blazevox.org

http://www.blazevox.org

http://www.blazevox.org
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