14 Poems in 516 Lines by George Fragopoulos

Chapbook, 2022

The poems in “14 Poems” were written in spring and summer of 2020, during the lockdowns in Brooklyn. They are full of walks – strolls down “cherry tree esplanades” or the marches of that summer’s uprisings. But their dérives are mostly temporal; a time-traveling blur of memories of people distant or lost, Tweets, and books, all hung together in the frame of poems named after their number of lines, the way walks seem like structure in days that bleed into each other. “My GPS conditions me to always know where I am if not when I am.” The lyric, always ancient & new, seeks to be its own answer in the poems. It orients us through these blurring walks and busts time open, like “a brick tossed in Athens” or a burning cop car, to “torque the I I was then into a we.”