To invite CAConrad to read or conduct workshops, email CAConrad13@aol.com
(click HERE for the interview byEileen Myles for The Poetry Foundation) (click HERE for the POETRY WILL NOT APOLOGIZE interview about the book with Tracy Diamond)
CAConrad's The Book of Frank is the recipient of THE GIL OTT BOOK AWARD, as chosen by Nathaniel Mackey, Myung Mi Kim, Eli Goldblatt, and Charles Alexander. THE GIL OTT BOOK AWARD honors the legacy of poet, publisher, and social activist Gil Ott.
CAConrad's voyeuresque surreal portrait of Frank includes apotheosis, rebirth, talking teapots and hats. It disrupts the landscape as "pins and/zippers of/other days/loosen." CA is very good news as a raconteur, poet, performer and activist and makes news daily with his dedicated Outrider passion and "alternative path" imagination. Onward, as Bob Creeley would say. —Anne Waldman
I can never have enough CAConrad, like paprika or wisdom in disguise. Is he the Frank of the book? —Bernadette Mayer
Dancing with a Kafka's ghost, these poems move concretely as CAConrad's protagonist "Frank" delights in the material word gone slightly mad—or is that actual and precise? The poems disturb, are uber-real: horrific, magical, glistening. The questions? Frank persists in them, just is and answers back in an "imaginary vocabulary". —Hoa Nguyen
The title character in CAConrad's The Book of Frank becomes an adult only after his mother dies, but even as a child he was prone to mystic visions. Now, he makes up movies in his head that people pay to watch from inside his body. He might as well be a poet. In his candid portrayal of human cruelty and its resultant fantasies of escape, CAConrad has written that rarest of poetry books—a gripping page-turner. —Alan Gilbert