Just Outside the Tunnel of Love

Literature & Fiction

Witte, Francine

Poetry

Blue Light Press

Dressed All Wrong for This is a splendid demonstration of the depth and range of the short-short story, an art form whose relevance and influence are rapidly growing in this digital age of compressed communication. Francine Witte brilliantly illuminates nuanced truths of the human condition in this collection, truths that could be expressed in no other way. Francine Witte's flash fiction has been published in numerous journals and the anthologies Flash Fiction Funny (Blue Light Press) and New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton.) She is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks, Cold June, (Ropewalk Press) winner of the 2010 Thomas Wilhelmus Award, and The Wind Twirls Everything (Musclehead Press.) Her novella-in-flash The Way of The Wind (Ad Hoc Press, ) was cited as a highly recommended selection in the Bath Flash Fiction Award. Her poetry chapbooks include two first-prize winners, First Rain (Pecan Grove Press, ) and Not All Fires Burn the Same (Slipstream Press.) She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Caf&#65533; Crazy, and The Theory of Flesh, (both from Kelsay Press.) Her play Love is a Bad Neighborhood was produced off-Broadway by Miller Coffman Productions. She edits the column Flash Boulevard on George Wallace's Facebook blog poetrybay. She is an associate editor for the South Florida Poetry Journal. She is a former high school teacher. She lives in Manhattan, NYC with her husband, Mark Larsen.

Dressed All Wrong for This

Don’t be misled by the title of this book. Though a tomato may scream if you stab it, or the vicissitudes of domestic life lick your ankles below your TV tray like a lupine tongue, there is more method than madness to Francine Witte’s portrayal of how crazy interweaves with the mundane in this collection. Read through Café Crazy and see just how sure her hand is on the tiller. Life may be fractured, and experience treacherous to navigate, but these poems offer a regenerative and welcome cohesion, guiding us surely through the complex truths and misunderstandings of the Human Experience. This is a voice you can trust to tell the real story; her story-telling gifts are in full force in these poems. Welcome to Café Crazy—enter here, though the aperture of a poetic voice in full command of its faculties. 
 –George Wallace, Writer in Residence, Walt Whitman Birthplace 
 In Café Crazy, Francine Witte serves up tough, street-smart narrators and injects them with an incurable sense of wit while exercising the imagination to its legal limits. The essence of Witte’s work is sometimes dark, sometime playful, but always frighteningly addictive. 
 –Meg Pokrass, author of The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down 
 Francine Witte’s Cafe Crazy serves up a series of singed epiphanies, the burn out of not one, but two marriages, their ashy remains. “Not all fires burn the same,” the poet warns in the opening poem of this fine collection, and she’s right—yet each betrayal burns, each ending leaves scars. This parallel journey of doomed relationships, the poet’s and that of her parents’, explores how love “gets lost inside somewhere while you’re not paying attention.” Witte’s skill lies in her willingness to go deep, and to spare no one. She longs for love, “But love, like any bird, gets tired of flying and looks for a place to nest.” These brave poems rise like the phoenix from the ashes. These are the poems that pull you through. These are the poems that save you. 
 –Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Enter Here; poetry editor, Cultural Weekly

Cafe Crazy

Kelsay Books

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Books by Witte, Francine