Kirjahaku

Francine Witte's flash fiction has been published in numerous journals and the anthologies Flash Fiction Funny (Blue Light Press, ) New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton, ) and Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton.) as well as Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions.She is the author of three flash fiction chapbooks, Cold June, (Ropewalk Press) winner of the 2010 Thomas Wilhelmus Award, The Wind Twirls Everything (Musclehead Press, ) and The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon, (ELJ Editions.) 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 Crazy, and The Theory of Flesh, (both from Kelsay Press.) She is editor of Flash Boulevard, published by George Wallace. She is the flash fiction editor of South Florida Poetry Journal. She is a former high school teacher. She lives in Manhattan, NYC with her husband, Mark Larsen. ENDORSEMENTS"The stories in Francine Witte's Just Outside the Tunnel of Love deftly skirt the boring center of love and instead poke and prod at the before and after of what it means to fall into and out of ... everything. She takes on the smash and smoosh and broken eggs of love. The language in this collection is exquisite and playful and mournful and sexy. Witte has mastered the short form. Pull up a chair."- Sherrie Flick, author of Thank Your Lucky Stars "There are a lot of doorways, portals, tunnels, windows, a lot of rides, vehicles, a lot of moves, movement, and moving moves to be found in these startled and startling concentrated compressed compositions of Francine Witte's.""Just Outside the Tunnel of Love's microcosms record macrocosmic depth and organic reach. Like the stunning snapshots from the Webb telescope these precise and pristine pixels, these immediate and intimate images pack and unpack billions and billions of years of light, calories of heat, stretches of space, and the ultimatums of time. All I have to say is: Hang on Let go "- Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana "A woman falls in love with a potato, another woman eats a husband made of ice cream, a cat espouses a theory about why its mistress's man left her. These brief tales of scorned lovers and shrewd daughters of swindler fathers are reminiscent of the nursery rhymes my grandmother read to me when I was a girl, the way Francine Witte's pixyish prose skips and twirls, laughs then bares its teeth. With stunning dexterity and whimsy, Witte whips up so much delight and menace. Just Outside the Tunnel of Love is an enchanting story collection by a master artisan of flash fiction."- Michelle Ross, author of They Kept Running

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 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.

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 Cafe 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 Cafe 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 Cafe 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

Francine Witte's The Theory of Flesh is just that, an accumulation of poetic evidence for the absurdity and heartbreak that accompanies our mortal costumes. She moves from pre-history and history into the present and personal with the same sharp and incisive sense of description, the same savvy toward the fickle cosmos. Anxiety, crop failure, sibling rivalry, and small-town affairs-each is another hand-drawn entry on the larger human scroll. Witte, as they say, knows the score, and she's willing to share it with us, to describe in no uncertain terms exactly what it means to be us-damned from the very get go and further doomed by folly and fate. Yet important enough in our trials to command the fine poet's attention. -Justin Hamm, author of The Inheritance and American EphemeralFrancine Witte's poems are full of a compassion for our frail, vulnerable selves, our frail, vulnerable earth, and they are implicit with a forgiveness for that frailty and stupidity, like a teacher who refuses to hold her students' foolhardiness or idiocy against them. As she writes in "Bravado" "Take away our medicines and guns, / and where are we, really? Not at the top / of the food chain, that's for sure. Our / teeth can barely tear a baguette, and forget / about breathing in the wrong stranger's / sneeze." In these poems, Witte goes straight for the elements that make up our lives, the love, the betrayal, the heartbreak; our weakness and our helplessness. Witte embraces our fallibilities. After all, "Maybe this is all a game. Maybe we are the players, / or the pieces, or the lookers-on who shake their / heads and bring us snacks." -Charles Rammelkamp, author of Me and Sal ParadiseFrancine Witte's literary voice is one of the strongest to emerge in the last few years. She combines sharp observations with a smart, biting sense of humor-her take on men and women in relationships is honest, and because of her intelligence, accurate. In The Theory of Flesh, she takes no prisoners -Ron Kolm, author of Night Shift and Welcome to the Barbecue