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In The Feast of St. Mary Mackillop, Bill Freind remakes the lyric into a restless, radiant field where memory, politics, and absurdity flicker against the backdrop of daily life. These poems hold the reader in the charged moment between collapse and invention, when the sacred brushes shoulders with the ridiculous and even the ordinary gas station hyacinths or a busted Camry open into something both devastating and luminous.
With mordant wit and unflinching clarity, Freind catalogues the textures of contemporary life: the half-heard chatter of news cycles, the surreal pageantry of consumer culture, the strange persistence of faith amid cynicism. A poem might leap from Keats to Ron DeSantis memes, from Adorno to drywall dust, from Antifa paranoia to the weight of love songs on the radio. The result is a poetry both playful and deeply serious, as if language itself were testing out new disguises to endure the bewilderments of our moment.
At once elegiac and hilarious, caustic and tender, The Feast of St. Mary Mackillop offers a vision of poetry as “obsolete apocalypse,” where every ending keeps beginning again. Freind’s voice is able to hold history, politics, pop culture, and private grief in the same breath that is alive to the strangeness and urgency of now.
Bill Freind’s The Feast of St. Mary Mackillop is a dazzling, irreverent, and moving collection where the sacred and the absurd collide in equal measure. With humor, urgency, and lyric brilliance, these poems traverse politics, pop culture, memory, and loss, revealing a world at once unmoored and astonishingly alive.
—Geoffrey Gatza
Bill Freind is the author of American Field Couches (BlazeVOX Books, 2008) and An Anthology (housepress, 2000) and the editor of the collection Chrysanthemums and Scuba Divers: The Writings of Araki Yasusada (Shearsman Books, 2011).
Book Information:
· Paperback: 72 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-513-7
$18
