Patient Frame

Best-selling author Steven Heighton's considerable dramatic lyric powers reach a new sophistication and intensity in the astonishing new collection Patient Frame. The book ranges from the court of the Medicis to the Mai Lai massacre; from love for a daughter and mother, through nightmare and displacement, to moments of painful acceptance; and from erotic passion to situations of deep moral failure. Heighton's work has long shown a resolve to achieve viable rapprochement between the mind’s cold structures and the earthbound drives of the body, and here these poems are part of an ongoing search, a scanning of our human horizons for moments of lasting value. These dynamic, vigorous, and tender poems are as engaged with the moment as they are with traditions of East and West. The collection also brings together more of Heighton's vital translations of poets as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges and Horace.