LOVABILITY

The follow-up to her 2014 collection Sorrow Arrow (winner of the 2015 Oregon Book Award for Poetry), Emily Kendal Frey’s volume LOVABILITY is a dialogue of social and interpersonal dynamics, as well as an exploration of the feelings of freedom and longing they produce. “Scourged the river bottom for my lost self”— she writes in the collection’s final poem, “I Became Less Acceptable to Those in Power”— “Brought them up/ Touched their face/ The armor/ Split and leaking light.” A professional counselor and teacher, Frey’s work in LOVABILITY uses direct, image-driven poems to name the world we are a part of, to listen in. LOVABILITY was a finalist for the 2022 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.