Praise for Piano Rats:
“The 44 pieces in Franki Elliott’s Piano Rats are like the best kind of chance meetings—weird and unsettling, specific and transformative. They are Frank O’Hara meets Ellen Kennedy, ‘first kiss’ meets ‘fuck off,’ ‘hell’ meets ‘rainstorm,’ poetry meets prose, narrative meets lyric, trailer park meets city street. But they are also entirely themselves, places where you ‘remember who you wanted to be.’”
~Kathleen Rooney, author of Oneiromance (an epithalamion), managing editor of Rose Metal Press.
“Piano Rats is an homage to being stuck between where you've been and where you still might go. It's just that you haven't quite figured out how to escape where you've been and frankly you have no idea what comes next. And it is this tension of stuckness in all its messy, druggy, sometimes hopeful, youthful confusion that lives here in these poems and explodes across these pages, all oozy and terribly electric.”
~Ben Tanzer, author of Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine, 99 Problems, My Father's House, and You Can Make Him Like You, among others.
“In Piano Rats you will find a young women drowning in sadness, and not worried about how she can hide it. Franki Elliot exposes what most bury beneath layers of shallow conversations, bottles of alcohol, and innuendo. She will subtly make you love her and hate her in the matter of a few well placed lines.”
~Jason Behrands, managing editor of Orange Alert Press.
“From page one, Franki's honesty and ability to drop an F-Bomb won my heart. Here is a woman who is no stranger to love. She’s suffered its beauty, its jealousy, and its brutal end. Her poetry is like a mirror hanging on my wall, reflecting my own emotions and thoughts back at me. She makes me want to scream ‘Fuck You’ to every guy I dated who didn’t ‘get me’. She makes me want to get behind the pretty words people throw around, quit beating around the bush, and see things for what they really are. She creates a language of her own, breathing out lines like: ‘Love sometimes is just another word for jealousy’, and ‘We can't save ourselves from anything that's supposed to happen.’”
~Lori Hettler of The Next Best Book Club (TNBBC) Blog.
“Franki Elliot's Piano Rats contains the kind of writing that forces its way into your thoughts. Her poems tingle the senses as the clever use of words often will, but there is more. They leave behind a love bite and a bruise. They're only felt deeply -- that good, hard heartbreak and tragedy that's nothing if not funny and sad at the same time. Like learning to live a little and with what you've got.”
~Matt Rowan, founding editor of www.UntowardMag.com
About the Author:
Franki Elliot is a 27 year old Chicago author who often is referred to as a “female Charles Bukowski” or “JD Salinger with a skirt.” She self-published a first edition of Piano Rats in 2010 that quickly sold-out. Curbside Splendor picked it up in 2011 for a second edition. She can’t keep a secret. This is her first book.
About the Publisher:
Curbside Splendor publishes work online and in print, sells books by Chicago presses and authors on a periodic basis at the Logan Square Farmers Market, and presents literary events at various venues throughout Chicago. Piano Rats marks its fourth publication. Staff include Curbside Splendor Editor-in-Chief Victor David Giron as Publisher, Curbside Splendor Sr. Managing Editor Jacob S. Knabb as Editor, and Curbside Splendor Managing Editors Lauryn Allison Lewis and Leah Tallon. Visit Curbside Splendor on the Web at www.curbsidesplendor.com. For additional information, contact Victor David Giron at info@curbsidesplendor.com or at (312) 342-5935.
Publication Details
Publication date: October 15, 2011
Edition: 2
Imprint: Curbside Splendor Publishing
Trade Paperback
72 pages; 4.0″ x 6.0″; $10.00 USD
ISBN: 978-0-9834228-3-9
Publisher: Victor David Giron
Author: Franki Elliot
Editor: Jacob S. Knabb
Designer: Shawn Stucky (http://www.shawnstucky.com/)
Website: http://curbsidesplendor.com/index.php?id=206
Availability
Publisher Direct - http://curbsidesplendor.bigcartel.com/product/piano-rats
Amazon.com - Kindle
Independent bookstores TBA
