[11/15/26] Talone, Bridget: The Frog in the Lake

Krupskaya Books, paperback

Publication Date: November 15, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

At times her language seems to come from nowhere, and to open up a door there,” Talone writes, an observation as true of her writing in The Frog in the Lake as of her child’s. These poems are, above all, effervescent visions of the mother-childhead, which wears a “witch’s hat”—an eidolon of her cosmology-- and travels its “upward curl” to the loving apex of imagination where the realms of motherhood and childhood unite, in poetic power. This power, uniquely her own, show us how generously precise and plush and expansive the truth dreamt in awe is. I have drunk and leaned and laughed from the balconies of these curls with this poet, have chugged the golden soda and wept and burped gratefully at how deeply I needed this vision myself, and then watched my tears rise in the exquizz fizz of Bridget Talone’s heart. – Farnoosh Fathi

Deep in the forest, covered in pearly foam. The forest which harbors stray children and escaped pet birds. Like anywhere enchanted, it offers its travelers both danger and safe passage, though it isn’t clear which is which, nor what transformations will unfurl. Talone, who holds the witch’s hat, guides us to the lake with her musical voice, vibrating in the collapsed tulip shape of dreams. These are poems of devotion and ambivalence, of work and sleep, wet with the “awful softness of lake water.” Weakness and strength are nesting dolls of the same size, which is also the scale at which these poems operate. Perhaps this is why they fill me equally with astonishment and fear. – Laura Henriksen