Frannie Lindsay's newest volume of poetry, Mayweed, is the 2009 winner of the Washington Prize and is now available from The Word Works. Her previous books areLamb, (Perugia Press, 2006) and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press, 2004). She is the 2008 winner of the Missouri Review Prize.

Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Yale Review, Black Warrior Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Field, Salamander, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry International, Harvard Review, Poetry East, Tampa Review, Hunger Mountain, and many other journals. They have also been featured on Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily, and read by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio's Writer's Almanac.  

She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts with her two retired greyhounds. She is also a classical pianist.

From the book:

In Bed with Janet
by Frannie Lindsay

Nothing was left for me but the gingerly climb
over the side rails, parting the sheets and arranging
the pillow she gave me to place on her stomach,
all this through the weatherless haze of her morphine drip,
so we could lie together, child to child,
sister to mother and everything wearily
vice versa, and hold her and stroke her hair
gone silky with illness and let her touch me
all over, the cello-bowing hand that had lost its deftness
drooping across my breast and she asked me
is this okay, is anything I am doing
bothering you, and I wanted to say
it was fine, her hand drained of its will
across my breast was fine,

but I moved her wrist
away, her palm an exhausted swimmer
dragging itself onto a steep little island of health
placed back in the deep lake of icy bedclothes,
and she said she was sorry, my dying sister
apologized for that tender, delirious gesture,
so purely lustless and seeking, oh how I wanted to
put her twitching palm over my nipple again,
unsay my refusal and let her hold me,
summon whatever solace she needed from me
like milk, like simple milk.

Mayweed

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