[02/15/25] Frym, Gloria: Lies & More Lies

BlazeVOX, paperback

Publication Date: February 15, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 

Comedy and tragedy intersect in this wildly honest and forceful collection of proses. While those in power twist the meaning of words and ideas and propagate false “news” in lethal ways, with irony and wit, Lies & More Lies beckons the reader to also witness the intimate and civic lies of the quotidian. Even as the work cries out for some kind of justice, Lies & More Lies transcends our lived absurdities. An undertow of ecological and social mourning permeates, suggesting that lies in the service of political and corporate gain contribute to and hasten potential global decimation. The collection is driven by language that has little use for a center, to paraphrase Stein, enabling the writer to play with digressions and associations reined in by the paragraph as organizing principle. As Baudelaire insists, “toujours poète, même en prose.”

Gloria Frym’s brain is bigger than the sky. Yet in her indictment of our regime of falsehoods, which is alas also bigger than the sky and much darker, she never once goes grandiose or abstract. Instead, she burrows into the “bag of doubt,” which I picture as a thing she has transformed into a stylish purse to brandish wherever she goes. That’s to say, Frym is holding the receipts, oh boy has she kept them, and though the costs they record are terrible, she’s defamiliarized the receipts into a kind of awestruck beauty.

—Jonathan Lethem

Realistic and beautifully humane all at once, this jewel of a book of prose poems, satires, and short fictions exposes all genres of bad faith. It contains sometimes whimsical and always profoundly accurate advice on how to relate to over and under zealous dogs, find a better tenant or mother, interview the unhoused and unlistening, and relate to exes, neighbors, and airport seatmates. More necessary advice follows regarding stains on the floor, how to age with acute watchfulness and verve and take care of our wobbling egos in this time of universal upheaval. What a profound and often moving bearer of witness. And in capturing the single notes of language that explain us, Frym creates a symphony for our terrible moment, a 2024 addition to “Adagio for Strings,” alive with caution and hope. Read this book--It will help you learn that words laced with honesty are the highest form to which writing may aspire.

—Maxine Chernoff

Behold! A series of modern fables that address the quality of truth in what has become a contemporary Age of Lies. Writing with a cosmic sense of humorous indignation, Frym plunges into the dilemmas of today's realities and metaphysical quandaries. What is true meaning! Who lies!

—Maureen Owen

Gloria Frym is a poet and prose writer. Her most recent books are How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays (BlazeVOX) and The True Patriot (Spuyten Duyvil). A collection of poems, Homeless at Home (Creative Arts Book Company), won an American Book Award. She is also the author of two critically acclaimed collections of short stories—Distance No Object (City Lights Books) and How I Learned (Coffee House Press)—as well as several volumes of poetry and a book of interviews with women artists, Second Stories (Chronicle Books). Frym is Professor Emerita of Writing & Literature at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She lives in Berkeley.