The Beautiful Lesson of the I

winner of the May Swenson Award, Utah State University Press, 2006

The Beautiful Lesson of the I is about the way consciousness and imagination preserve what the eye takes in, turning it back into beauty and art. It will reward the scholar and the student of poetry, as well as the reader looking for the simple pleasures of poetic insight authentically felt. Frances Brent’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Notre Dame Review, Yale Review, and in many other journals. Her work is known for its delicacy and detail, evoking both the Symbolists and some of the Asian poets who inspired them. She includes May Swenson among her influences, too; like Swenson, Brent often steadies her gaze on the material world, delighting in its humor as well as its occasional horror.