Cafe Crazy

Don't be misled by the title of this book. Though a tomato may scream if you stab it, or the vicissitudes of domestic life lick your ankles below your TV tray like a lupine tongue, there is more method than madness to Francine Witte's portrayal of how crazy interweaves with the mundane in this collection. Read through Café Crazy and see just how sure her hand is on the tiller. Life may be fractured, and experience treacherous to navigate, but these poems offer a regenerative and welcome cohesion, guiding us surely through the complex truths and misunderstandings of the Human Experience. This is a voice you can trust to tell the real story; her story-telling gifts are in full force in these poems. Welcome to Café Crazy-enter here, though the aperture of a poetic voice in full command of its faculties.

-George Wallace, Writer in Residence, Walt Whitman Birthplace

In Café Crazy, Francine Witte serves up tough, street-smart narrators and injects them with an incurable sense of wit while exercising the imagination to its legal limits. The essence of Witte's work is sometimes dark, sometime playful, but always frighteningly addictive.

-Meg Pokrass, author of The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down

Francine Witte's Cafe Crazy serves up a series of singed epiphanies, the burn out of not one, but two marriages, their ashy remains. "Not all fires burn the same," the poet warns in the opening poem of this fine collection, and she's right-yet each betrayal burns, each ending leaves scars. This parallel journey of doomed relationships, the poet's and that of her parents', explores how love "gets lost inside somewhere while you're not paying attention." Witte's skill lies in her willingness to go deep, and to spare no one. She longs for love, "But love, like any bird, gets tired of flying and looks for a place to nest." These brave poems rise like the phoenix from the ashes. These are the poems that pull you through. These are the poems that save you.

-Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Enter Here; poetry editor, Cultural Weekly

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