The Plague of the Tender-Hearted by Cindy Frenkel

In The Plague of the Tender-Hearted, Cindy Frenkel makes her way through the maze of family death, divorce, even a brother’s suicide without ever losing the ability to embrace joys small and large. Despite heart-rending troubles there is still beauty in the natural world, the discovery of an unlikely new love, and moments with a beloved daughter when night “stars spill out, / enough to occupy the universe.”

–Mary Jo Firth Gillett

With her three-part alchemy of plain speaking, suddenly perfect metaphors, and explosive, morally anchored last lines, Cindy Frenkel portrays a family in The Plague of the Tender-Hearted.  From the witty to the elegiac, the poems quest for the why beneath a brother’s suicide and examine the underside of prosperity.  But the marvels of this collection are the sassy buoyant poems of love for a daughter and unexpected love after divorce.  Frenkel uses memory, the dynamics of ageing parents, and the legacy of the Holocaust to pierce us with her bullseye poetic one-liners.  The Plague of the Tender-Hearted, with its gem-like rhymes, is both an exploration and a revelation.

–Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst and Cornucopia:  New & Selected Poems