Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death

Poetry. ” Frank Gaspar’s beautifully wrought poems in this exquisite book surge with the heat of human desire fueled by the luminosity of a transient grace. These are extraordinary poems-precise, musically complex, darkly radiant, and startlingly wise. Their power accrues exponentially, as Gaspar’s lamentations, half-spoken prayers, and songs of the flesh and spirit collide and merge into a seamless quest for an affirmation of existence, wherein each of us must ‘walk so tenuously among the tenuous living'”—Maura Simon.