Books by Diane Frank

While Listening to the Enigma Variations

Diane Frank's terrific While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems, shows us a poet over a long and rich career who is undefeated by the acknowledged difficulties of living an affirmative life. She concludes an elegy to a friend by saying, "Shine your light into the dark world," and this is what Frank does in her poems. She's an ecstatic poet, who finds joy in music, dance, poetry, and, in general, in art itself. A book to have by your bedside when things seem bad.
— Stephen Dunn, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
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Letters From a Sacred Mountain Place

Walk with Diane on two different treks (400 miles) in the Nepal Himalayas. With her photographs and her beautifully written narrative, she will take you to many Sacred Mountain Places, exploring all the local sights and customs along the way. A feast for the senses!
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Canon for Bears and Ponderosa Pines

"In this new and startling collection, Diane Frank’s poems transcend not just genres but entire dimensions. [...]"
— Lois P. Jones, Radio Host, KPFK’s Poets Café
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Yoga of the Impossible, a novel

“In Yoga of the Impossible, a series of journeys of the mind, the heart, and the whole spirit dance, punctuated by the most amazing imagery. At some place in this picaresque work, the reader will stand up and cheer. I guarantee it.”
—Mary Norbert Korte, author of The Persephone Poems
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Swan Light

"These poems of love returning to love, and light returning to light, are a heart gone supernova. Page by page Frank burns a path to her readers' hearts. The alignments are profound, the connections electric – from heart to bone, from marrow to star. These are radiant poems, where we earthbound creatures may find simultaneous escape and renewal." – George Wallace, Walt Whitman Birthplace Writer in Residence.
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Entering the Word Temple

Entering the Word Temple is Diane's fifth collection of poems. Tomas Transtromer once said that poems are meeting places for souls. Diane Frank can enter, at will, that region where visions reveal themselves like snapshots. She transcribes these as jewel-like images on the page, through a vocabulary steeped in the natural world and the insistent predilections of the human heart. This is a journey made with luminous eyes.
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Blackberries in the Dream House

Blackberries in the Dream House is a forbidden love story about a geisha and a Buddhist monk in Kyoto, Japan 150 years ago. It's written in the genre of magical realism. Praised for the beauty of its language, this novel is deeply feminine, erotic and metaphysical, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
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The Winter Life of Shooting Stars

The Winter Life of Shooting Stars is Diane Frank's latest and most powerful collection of poems. These poems have been praised for their imagistic wildness, humor, and a stunning level of emotional honesty. Two of the poems in this book, "Window of Poppies" and "In the Japanese Garden," were nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
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The All Night Yemenite Café

The poems in The All Night Yemenite Café range from Iowa to San Francisco and late night Tel Aviv. Inspired by a journey to Israel two months after the Persian Gulf war, this book is an artistic journey of emotional risks and a powerful coming to terms. These are poems that push the edge with language alchemy, emotional intensity and visual beauty.
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Rhododendron Shedding Its Skin

Rhododendron Shedding Its Skin is full of shaman poems and Goddess mythology. This book has sharper edges than her first collection, but they open to a new level of vision. The poet depends on touch rather than vision to see the real world; often the eyes are used to look beyond reality.
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Isis: Poems by Diane Frank

Isis is Diane Frank's first collection of poems and contains the best of her early work. The poems take their own imaginative pathways and never go quite where you expect them to. "Disintegration — Early Morning" won the Whiffen Poetry Prize.
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Fog and Light: San Francisco through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here

This anthology selected by Diane Frank is a love letter to San Francisco... in this collection of poems, we show you the city that most tourists miss...
Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, Alejandro Murguía, Barbara Quick, Thomas Centolella, Kathy Evans, Alice Rogoff, Alison Luterman, Daniel J. Langton, Robert Scotellaro, Jane Underwood, and many other celebrated poets. Order from Amazon

River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the 21st Century

This anthology selected by Diane Frank features more than 100 poets, mixing the best voices of our generation with the grass roots -- poets who have won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, along with lesser known poets who also deserve to be read. #2 bestseller on Amazon for poetry anthologies! #3 bestseller for all American Poetry! Order from Amazon

Eclipsed Moon Coins: Twenty-Six Visionary Poets

Eclipsed Moon Coins is an anthology of Twenty-Six Visionary Poets, selected and edited by Diane Frank. Poets include Tom Centolella, Sharon Bousquet, Terry Brennan, Rustin Larson, Meg Fitz-Randolph, Carla Christiansen, Michael Carey, Rae Bales, Corinne Erly, Sandie Kopff, and Viktor Tichy. (Sold out)

The Book of Eros: Arts and Letters from Yellow Silk

The Book of Eros is an evocative collection of poems, short stories, and art celebrating and exploring the myriad forms Eros takes in our lives, selected from the award-winning journal Yellow Silk. Authors such as Jane Hirshfield, Galway Kinnell, Bharati Mukherjee, Sharon Olds, Marge Piercy, Ntozake Shange, and Diane Frank have lifted the subject of Eros up from genre fiction and into the mainstream of contemporary literature. (order info.)

Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets

Voices on the Landscape is an anthology of contemporary Iowa poets. Some of the poets in the book are among this nation's most famous and well-respected, others are known only regionally. Included are farmers, university professors, grass roots poets, a Native American activist, a lawyer, a housewife, businessmen, scientists, an ecologist, and a social worker - a snapshot of the soul of Iowa. (order info.)