The Frog Poem Project
by Nicolette Costanzo | illustrations by Alice Lam
The Frog Poem Project is a book-length poem structured like a textbook, informed by decades of creative research into frog dissection manuals, antique medical handbooks, surgical gynecological texts, visits to a human cadaver anatomy lab, and frog festivals in Rayne, Louisiana and Calaveras County, California.
Following an arc from trauma to healing, it is a poetic inquiry that begins with metaphors conjured by examination in a doctor’s office and explores the unexpected beauty embedded in clinical and biological terminology around bodies.
A response to the temporality of scientific language, it highlights the traces of meaning that remain on the individual and collective level even when vocabulary is lost. As a poem project, it expands the parameters of a traditional collection of poems, creating a space where, through the lens of poetry, multiple genres and diverse disciplines like art and science can coalesce to create new knowledge.
“If you are a reader looking to disrupt your assumptions about genres and modes, especially those of species-being and care, this book will deliver that disruption, leaving new interdisciplinary strategies for care in its wake.”
-C.R. Grimmer, Ph.D., M.F.A., Utah State University
“A collage work, gentle collisions of ideas, perceptions, mocking the didactic way of manuals while usurping their form. Serious fun.”
-Jon Jost, filmmaker / artist / writer / musician
Grand Prize Short List
Poetry, First Runner-Up
The Medal Provocateur Finalist for cutting-edge poetry
First Horizon Award Finalist for superior work by debut authors
