Description

 

Inventions and Variations
with Selected Works 2002-2025

by WD Frank

Multi-award-winning poet, artist, and historian WD Frank gathers a selection of previously published work into one volume with the addition of ten new poems inspired by a deep dive into the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Enhancing the text are samples of Frank’s paintings in watercolor, acrylic, and oil, several of which were created especially for this collection.

Early Praise:

WD Frank’s poems are not bound by time. They take you to liminal spaces, through spirals of seasons, from Europe to Seattle to the shrub-steppe to the afterlife. Frank sweeps centuries, brings us ancient voices, myth, war—and wildflowers, nighthawks, and symphonies. A buttermilk moon. Wherever he takes you, Frank’s words breathe and shimmer on the page. Frank writes transportive poems, political poems, and perhaps most arresting—poems that look unblinkingly into the depths of love, loss, and despair. With beautiful precision of language, Frank’s poetry careens into sky and sorrow. It spins in the disorientation of love outside the linear—in all those echoes and reconfigurations. And yet, like constellations found again and again in different skies, the North Star all along is WD Frank’s love itself.

—Keely Murphy Pickerel, award-winning poet, author of This Steady Place

Inventions and Variations remind us of the fragility of things, asking us to reflect on what we’ve loved, what we’ve lost, and where we might find solace. Frank finds comfort in remembrance, and in continuing dialogue with his departed wife: “Now I try to fathom where you’ve gone/ in the canyon’s bare trees/ whose white-spider branches/ scrabble your memory across/ a web of grey sky.” In the beauty of the landscape they once shared—“the delicate architecture of snow/ more air than ice,” owls gliding “beneath a buttermilk moon,” “grass widows backlit and glowing/ a thousand vermillion lanterns in the morning sun.” And in conversations sparked by distant voices from other times and places—Sappho, Catullus, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides. This poet reminds us that when it comes to grief, words often fail us. But we try anyway. You will be moved by the scale, beauty, weave and musings of WD Frank’s poems. The way he dances here with words, time, and ideas is transporting.

—Terry Martin, award-winning poet, author of The Light You Find

About the Author

WD Frank is an artist, musician, writer, and occasional professor of history from Yakima, WA. In addition to regional honors for poetry (including the Tom Pier Prize in 2004, 2016, and 2021), his two books on Russian sport and recent contribution to a collection of essays published in Austria received Ullr awards from the International Ski History Association in 2015, 2019, and 2025. His articles have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Journal of Sport History, Ski History Magazine, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, and Suomen Urheiluhistoriallisen Seuran Vuosikirja, Finland’s sport history yearbook. McFarland Publishers released his latest book, Under Mountain Shadows: Kay Kershaw, Lesbian Eco-Warrior of the Pacific Northwest, in 2024. He is currently working on a series of entries for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Sport and Exercise, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2026.

Since 2006, Frank’s paintings have received numerous honorable mentions and awards at Larson Gallery’s Central Washington Artists’ Exhibition in Yakima and at Boxx Gallery in Tieton, WA. His work is also included in the Central Washington Artist Permanent Collection at the Yakima Valley Museum.

For more information: cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501747403/skis-in-the-art-of-war/