Chris Stroffolino on Gloria Frym: The Art of Reading, Writing, and Discovery

Written by Geoffrey Gatza

What does it mean to be devoted to literature? For poet and essayist Chris Stroffolino, Gloria Frym’s How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays, published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2020, offers a compelling answer. In a thoughtful new review for Seneca Review, Chris explores a collection that moves across decades of writing, bringing together literary criticism, personal reflection, and an abiding curiosity about the possibilities of language.

For BlazeVOX, it is especially gratifying to see Chris Stroffolino bring such care and insight to a book from our own list. His review celebrates the restless, exploratory spirit that makes Frym’s work so compelling: a willingness to follow language wherever it leads, to challenge inherited boundaries, and to remain open to what a close encounter with literature can reveal.

There is another reason to celebrate Chris this fall. In the Fall 2026 issue of BlazeVOX, Chris joins Adeena Karasick in a conversation titled “In the monstrous convulsions/of reciprocity,” Sonic Warfare meets Medi(t)ations. Discussing their most recent books, the two writers explore their own distinctive approaches to language, sound, and poetic possibility. It is a fitting companion to Chris’s review of Frym, bringing the spirit of literary exchange into the present through two adventurous contemporary writers.

Both pieces invite us to think of literature not as a closed canon or a collection of settled answers, but as an ongoing conversation among writers, readers, and generations. We’re proud to share Chris’s work and to keep these conversations alive at BlazeVOX.

Read Chris Stroffolino’s review: On Gloria Frym’s How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays — Seneca Review

Read the conversation: Adeena Karasick and Chris Stroffolino in the Fall 2026 issue of BlazeVOX

Hurray for Gloria Frym, Chris Stroffolino, and all the writers who remind us that literature is a living, ever-expanding conversation!

Geoffrey Gatza
BlazeVOX [books]
publisher of weird little books

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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The Fall 2026 BlazeVOX Journal is here