Dear America: A Review of Suzanne Frischkorn’s Whipsaw – Terrain.org

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Dear America: A Review of Suzanne Frischkorn’s Whipsaw – Terrain.org

Whipsaw: Poems
By Suzanne Frischkorn
Anhinga Press | 2024 | 70 pages

In a world of political, cultural, and environmental chaos—which is to say, just after the presidential election of 2016—Terrain.org launched the Letter to America series. We reached out to poets, essayists, artists, and other progressive thinkers to bring forth their voices to, as Alison Hawthorne Deming wrote in her letter that jump-started the series, “be artful, inventive, and just, my friends, but do not be silent.”

Cuban-American poet Suzanne Frischkorn was one of the first to break the stunned silence that followed the election. Her poem, “Dear America,” is a blade-sharp response. In a powerful series that has published more than 260 entries, it remains one of my favorites. The poem begins:

It’s time to teach my daughter how to shoot an arrow
How to use a knife
How to hit the center of a target
It’s bloody work, but she should know

As a father of two daughters, “Dear America” is a poem I return to again and again because, as we all know, real threats to young women in America and across the globe remain. And as we head into another presidential election where, somehow, the rights of all women have become even more restricted in America since 2016, it’s a poem that has become even more essential.

Frischkorn’s “Dear America” is a poem that recognizes the very real risks of being a young woman in America, yet it’s also a poem of hope. It’s a poem that recognizes “even if it’s less convenient to travel across town / It’s always best to trust her intuition,” yet it’s also a poem of resistance and power, because “America, she’s her mother’s daughter / She’s got this.”

Threat and hope. Intuition and resistance. Power.

These are the terms that likewise define Whipsaw, Frischkorn’s fourth full-length poetry collection. Whipsaw builds from “Dear America”—the collection’s first poem—into a rich mosaic of poems that confront modern American culture and our often toxic impacts on landscape and psyche in verse both lyrical and lasting. Simply put, Whipsaw is a stunning book that will remain timeless. Yet it is also timely, considering we perch just two months from what may be American democracy’s most important presidential election ever.

Take, for instance, Frischkorn’s poem “Tahlequah,” about the infamous orca mother who guided her baby for 17 days around the Salish Sea after the calf’s death:

She carries her grief: she nudges it to the surface
for weeks, and when the grief weighs her down,

her sister whales carry her grief for her.
Women carry grief too, in their pockets.

Their grief is like sea glass, or stones, or loose change.

Is there any other grief as substantial as the grief of a mother who loses her child? I can’t imagine, and yet Frischkorn reminds us that all mothers understand this grief, for given a world set on consumption and profit, children are always at risk.

Grief and darkness underlie many of the poems of Whipsaw, but the poems offer much more. The poem “I Too Love Oblivion,” for example, reminds us of the beauty in darkness, even if danger lurks there. It ends:

The screaming you hear in deepest night,
is not a woman being dismembered,
it’s the fisher cat who’s not really a cat,
but a carnivorous weasel.
              He’s here to remind you
the forest is beautiful
dark. It’s beautiful dangerous.
Every morning this summer
               the cicadas hummed the song—
                                                          you are outnumbered.

If the poems of the first section of Whipsaw balance on this borderline of beauty and danger, the second section—the long poem “Before the Gods Existed the Woods Were Sacred”—fully submerses us in that gauzy, forested place. It begins, “We open the world by transcending the world.” In ten six-line stanzas, each set on its own page, we move through the forest’s beguiling half-light, understanding “[t]his delicate Aeolian harp nature has set” and taking “infinity into our lungs” until we are one with the woods, because, after all, “The tree has its being in you.”

Trees—what they are, what they once were, how they branch us into the industrial and psychological ills of America—are central to many of the poems in Whipsaw, and clearly to the poet herself, living in the forested and reforested landscape of the Northeast. Yet they are both metaphorical and literal, as we discover in such poems as “More Woods Fewer People,” which concludes the book’s short third section and takes its title from a New York Times headline for living in Redding, Connecticut, and in “Forest, Early Autumn,” which begins the fifth and final section of the book. The poem ends:

I want to write
about the forest, the way leaves change
in a seductive, slow dance in early autumn.
I want to explore root systems, how parent
trees guide nutrients to their sapling.
I want to tell you trees grow close to each other
over great distance and many years.
He tried to drown me in his bottle of sorrows.
He keeps it by his side while he ticks
columns of who wronged him, how and why.
Trauma is delicate
twenty years can pass
and like a hair-trigger pistol someone explodes.
Someone says, enough.

To live in America today is to live in a landscape of trauma—political, cultural, environmental, and for many, personal. So many Americans know this more deeply (and historically), certainly, than I do. So I turn to poets and other storytellers to help me recognize and account for that trauma. In the powerful, poignant poems of Whipsaw, Frischkorn does just that.

Fortunately, as with “Dear America,” Frischkorn doesn’t abandon us in the trauma or the grief—in the sudden smoky darkness—even if there are flames just outside our window. Let me leave you here with one example in full, which originally appeared in Across the Social Distances: Poetry in the Time of the Virus:

To Breathe It Would Choke You

The fire outside my window burns all afternoon
thick, white smoke curls up through the trees.
              What is our neighbor burning?
My body is heavy now, the hard won posture
slumps in a chair. On the desk a lamp, brushed
nickel with parallel coil springs, the black cord
trails behind. Its spotlight shines away from me.
Outside my window the forest understory a new
green. This week tree buds unfurl, and today fire
blazes. Flames six feet high fed by what? Now
visible only through a gap of a fallen tree
at rest and the stone wall. The smoke curls & curls.
              To breathe it would choke you.
My daughter is singing in her room.
              The last bird call of the evening.

Daughters and birdsong. Threat and hope. Intuition and resistance. Power.

Suzanne Frischkorn’s Whipsaw is an extraordinary collection from an accomplished poet who deftly guides the reader through an America full of beauty and danger, an America all the more navigable thanks to these poems. Every poem is a kind of letter to America, intricately crafted, brazen and brilliant. Read this timely book before the election, then read it again for its timeless guidance, its lasting lyricism, its essential if cautious hope.

Read poetry by Suzanne Frischkorn appearing in Terrain.org: “Dear America”, Two Poems, and Three Poems,

Simmons Buntin is the author of Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far, publishing in March 2025 by Trinity University Press. He is also the author of two collections of poetry published by Ireland’s Salmon Poetry—Bloom and Riverfall—and, with Ken Pirie, a collection of sustainable community case studies, Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places. With Elizabeth Dodd and Derek Sheffield, he is co-editor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. Simmons is the founding editor-in-chief of Terrain.org and president and director of the board of Terrain Publishing. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Also in Terrain.org: Simmons Buntin’s “Poetry, Ecology, and Place in a Technological World.”

Header image generated by AI, courtesy Adobe Photoshop.