The Fragility of Winter by Irene FickISBN: 9781956782974
Publication Date: 2025-03-15
Irene Fick’s expansive new poetry collection The Fragility of Winter is a triumph of deft, often humorous, and always careful observation. Fick creates interconnected narratives that draw from her own Italian heritage and middle-class upbringing. Through poems like “I Lost My Aunt At Kmart,” Fick breathes life into family members long gone, musing, “As we leave Kmart, I wonder: how did she / disappear so easily? How could I have lost her?” This is a dance between grounding detail and thoughtful questioning, what Fick does so well—she distills the beauty found in day-to-day life. “We are caught in this avalanche of ache, this dried-up sea of broken glass,” she writes in “A Narrative Poet Lost in the Lyric Moment.” Yet, despite the pain that often accompanies the raw truth of recollection, Fick finds a path to comfort and acceptance, not despair. She assures her readers, but perhaps more importantly, Fick seems to assure herself, “…what I wouldn’t give / to return to my life, its uneasy turbulence, / its precious, beautiful mess.”
