Description

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Fling Diction is a book about the vulnerability of desire; these poems explore different styles of relationships, including queer love, polyamory, familial drama, dog and human companionship, and longing in isolation. The characters find and lose each other in rural and urban settings; their experiences are intensified by the sensuality and ferocity of nature. This book is a record of the speaker’ s blunders, embraces, and revelations as she seeks knowledge of the elusive other.

About the Author

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Frances Cannon is an interdisciplinary writer, editor, educator, and artist. She recently served as the Managing Director of the Sundog Poetry Center in Vermont. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA in poetry and printmaking from the University of Vermont. Her published books include: Walter Benjamin Reimagined, MIT Press, among others. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Poetry Northwest, The North American Review, The Iowa Review, among others. She is the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellow at Kenyon College, 2023 - 2025. ,

Praise For…

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“Frances Cannon’s poems are framed closely within her particular, sensual vision of the world. This lens delights in environment: the yawning tongue of orchids, velvet cheeks of lady slippers, sun-bleached exoskeletons of crabs, and cinnamon ferns with sharp teeth.” —Bianca Stone, author of What is Otherwise Infinite

“The poems in Frances Cannon’s Fling Diction move breathlessly through an ever-changing landscape of desire. This is a collection suffused with erotic tension, intent observation, and naked honesty. In these poems boundaries of conventional relationships are disrupted and what emerges is a voice ravenous for love, and for pleasure. Here is the vibrant freedom that is found when one is 'without a diagram / for this shifting shape'." —Alison Prine, author of Steel 

"The jewels within the collection are illustrated across a range of Cannon’s controlled poetic skill. From every word to every positioning of each verse to the range of form paired with intermittent visual art pieces by Cannon that also tie to another layer which is the beauty of this collection: the danger and the sheer erotism that is nature itself. Come. Be taken. Be swept up and held by Cannon’s latest work." —Shanta Lee, author of Black Metamorphoses and This is How They Teach You How to Want It… The Slaughter