Frame Narrative

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Dennis Barone approaches subjects from oblique angles, addresses his themes with unexpected variations. There are jumps and twists throughout these poems, elements that disrupt the through-line, like “that bad camera angle / Throwing chin and jaw out of whack.” You can feel his wariness about straightforward telling, and sense his readiness to shift directions, for the sake of wit and because he, by temperament, resists certainties. The poems are often meditative but never in a staid manner, always wide-eyed and alert, ears perked. Part of the intrigue of these poems comes from the unusual iconography he deploys: the briefcase with “two bright gold locks” or the “small shadow of footsteps.” We learn as we read Barone, “How things are like / other things and how // they are not.”
—James Finnegan

Frame Narrative by Dennis Barone is an exquisite book whose poems spin out of a surreal universe into wisps of narrative and back again. Beautifully imagistic, these poems give voice to the unknown and unknowable.
—Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Frame Narrative provides an incisive experience occurring in the distance between a story and the senses that locate, describe, even divine it. Dennis Barone guides our sensing, with a distinctly analytical attention as affection, as the is and the if only mesh in readiness to be felt. He tells us “Sometimes an impulse needs events.” These events, once known, find frames. As happens, “Someone cared enough to save them,” thus the very history of our lives, selectively perceived, retained, embraced.
—Sheila E. Murphy