People tripped up on aesthetic might miss this treasure. Suzanne Frischkorn’s girl on a bridge has many jewels.

Truthfully? Often the poems that turn their gaze to language are the ones that interest me most. I’m not as interested in the poems with less mystery. But even ‘those’ poems, the direct and narrative, are well crafted.

This collection is sass and rogue and renegade. The sass articulates in “the seams about to bust” (“Sister”). Found in this collection are some little t truths of past and present and how we negotiate the woman self.

“get down on your knees and say thanks” she ends “Praise”—otherwise an observed flight and landing of birds.

Yes, I thought while reading, I too in my 20s (mmm. maybe 30s too) was “mad as daisies” and “slid through the atmosphere/and skid on the stars” but “kept her mouth shut”—during those important development years (“Limited Range of Motion”).

In “Sales Pitch at the Lipstick Counter,” “Language falls/through music, beat raw/this time, smears women over.” Here is the anti-smear poem, where the smear on woman is turned on itself.

The mystery of poems like “When the Sun Came Out They Disappeared”—well, these are the poems that move me most.

There are exceptions to my language-focused rule. “Divine Madness” is one of Frischkorn’s more narrative pieces and one that strikes me as particularly meaningful. It ends: “He/tried to cork rage with a long dog tag/chain before it spilled and burned someone. See,/he has a bit of Jesus in him.” I’m reminded of what Brian Evenson’s fiction seems set out to do. Don’t bother me either with the fact that I’m comparing apples to oranges. It seems to me that Evenson's work conceptually, as this poem, is very driven to explore matters of religious and large social/cultural systems in our country and the way in which those systems might contribute to violence and other more heartwrenching products of capitalism and a severely awry cultural politics of difference.

I encourage you to get with that girl on a bridge and see what lands when you trust fall.