Returns: Poems Selected and New
“Since I discovered Kenny Fries’s poems, they’ve haunted me as only work of rare brilliance can.”
Returns: Poems Selected and New
Kenny Fries
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Syracuse University Press | Amazon | Bookshop.org
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Propel Poetry Book Series
With his poems, essays, memoirs, journalism, and advocacy, Kenny Fries has been in the vanguard of disability literature for over forty years. From considerations of Darwin and Social Darwinism to the flinty and dismissive corridors of American medicine, Fries shows us how disability, embodiment, queerness, curiosity, and contrarianism can push us toward hope. With Returns: Poems Selected and New, the power of his lyricism reminds us why poetry truly matters. This is an important book by a poet at the height of his craft.
“When Kenny Fries says, ‘I’m writing about our lives,’ he’s delivering on a promise to amplify the experiences of those of us whose differences rattle the social and public spaces that, out of politeness, anxiety, or malice, would rather we be unseen and unheard. Returns, however, doesn’t speak of victimhood but of personhood, a much more intimate and consequential journey voiced through the remarkable power of his poetry. No body, we learn, is ‘born unwhole’ when it is fortified by inner strength, self-determination, and love.”
—Rigoberto González, recipient of the 2025 Ruth Lily Poetry Prize and author of To The Boy Who Was Night
“What a blessing to have, in one retrospective volume, Kenny Fries’s beautiful, forthright poetry, in which spirituality and protest are fused, and unwavering attention to fortifying love, urgent disability and queer witness, is paramount. Returns: Poems Selected and New is cause for heartfelt applause and celebration. “The Healing Notebooks” remains a remarkable and indelible survivor’s testament to the day-to-day phenomena of the AIDS pandemic. In Fries’s cogent, reliably compelling work, artful, indeed restorative silence, and fine-crafted lineation consistently create something poignant, intimate, elemental, capable of moving us beyond bullying erasure, beyond looming catastrophe and complacency in both our troubled private and public realms.”
—Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas and author of More Than Watchmen at Daybreak
“What a revelation to encounter afresh a mainstay writer in my personal canon through a larger, shimmering portal! It isn’t that I wasn’t familiar with Kenny Fries’s stubborn beauty or with how defining his art is. There is another order of co-presence. I am now learning that the explanation for poetry is mutual exposure. ‘The distant mountains mold your body,’ says one poem of a lover, ‘into flesh again.’ Instruments of science used to distort disability and queerness are here inverted. Astonishing intimacy breathes through every page. I rejoice to think of all the readers who will discover this treasury of care and attention.”
—John Lee Clark, author of How To Communicate, National Book Award Finalist
“Returns: Poems Selected and New is the book I’ve been waiting for. Since I discovered Kenny Fries’s poems, they’ve haunted me as only work of rare brilliance can. And now we have his own selection of earlier poems plus new ones in an entirely different register: more lyrical but also speaking from his lived experience that awakens all the senses. Fries doesn’t simply write about landscape and the body, queer love, difference, and disability; he takes us there. His poems speak not only to the queer, the different or disabled, but to every one of us in these brutal and revealing times.”
—Margaret Randall, author of I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist Revolutionary and Wild Card