Bidart, Frank

For more than 50 years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Metaphysical Dog: Poems, Watching the Spring Festival: Poems, Star Dust: Poems, Desire: Poems, and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90. Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and the 2017 National Book Award. In Against Silence: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), Bidart’s 11th poetry collection, he urges others to join the chorus. He writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, spoken words and cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and his past, Bidart calls forth. With nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak. LitHub.com called Bidart “a gift,” and celebrated that he “continues his lifelong navigation of the uncertain spaces between haunting and love, and the fertile gap between words and the world.”