Frank X. Gaspar

Frank X. Gaspar was born and raised in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and now lives in southern California where he teaches at Long Beach City College. He served in the Navy during the Vietnam conflict, and after his discharge he earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He's published poems and short stories in numerous journals, including The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The New England Review, The Georgia Review, and others. His first collection of poems, The Holyoke, won the Morse Prize in 1988. He's been an NEA Fellow, a John Atherton Fellow at Breadloaf, and a Walter Dakin Fellow at Sewanee (University of the South). His Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death won the 1995 Anhinga Prize for Poetry.

MASS FOR THE GRACE OF A HAPPY DEATH
BY FRANK X. GASPAR
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Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry (1994)

Frank Gaspar's beautifully wrought poems in this exquisite book surge with the heat of human desire fueled by the luminosity of a transient grace. These are extraordinary poems -- precise, musically complex, darkly radiant, and startlingly wise. Their power accrues exponentially, as Gaspar's lamentations, half-spoken prayers, and songs of the flesh and spirit collide and merge into a seamless quest for an affirmation of existence, wherein each of us must "walk so tenuously among the tenuous living." -- Maurya Simon