Frances Justine Post

Frances Justine Post is the recipient of the "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize and the Inprint Paul Verlaine Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review Online, and others. Originally from Sullivan's Island, SC, she received her MFA from Columbia University and is currently earning her PhD in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Houston.

Tony Hoagland (What Narcissism Means to Me) on BEAST:

"There is plenty of Circe, and plenty of Caliban, too, in the poems of Frances Justine Post's book BEAST. Carl Jung would have nodded in affirmation at the way in which myth and archetype pulse and flow under the surface of her poems—wolf, whale, cannibal, fire, doll. Her monologues cast the speaker's self into these tableaux, and it's hard to convey the detailed viscerality with which Post renders the human psyche—in all its needy, vengeful, rueful, generous and knowing configurations. 'What have you been killing, my dear? / Let me wipe your chin.' ... There is so much bravado, courage, insight, and self-knowledge in the poems that BEAST feels like a weird, wild, somewhat frightening party. Not to mention the sensuous, acrobatic flamboyance of Post's remarkable writing, which carries this psychic carnival all proudly into Art."

Kevin Prufer (In a Beautiful Country) on BEAST:

"Frances Justine Post's BEAST is an intimate and startling exploration of a many-faceted, unmoored self. Here, the speaker prepares for disaster in the shadow of a volcano; crawls deep inside an enormous whale, lying down "on the bed of its liver"; finds herself transformed into a pack of hounds or, later, into a cannibal consuming the body of the beloved whose loss colors these poems. With ventriloquistic energy, musical innovation, and fascinating intelligence, Post examines the shifting psyche's relationship with a world of natural beauty, grief, joy, and chaos. This is a terrific debut collection of poems."