Famous

She "became famous, finally, to herself," Kathleen Flenniken writes. This is the kind of fame at the heart of most lives and at the center of Flenniken's first collection, the winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Here "a little voice sings / from the back of the auditorium / of my throat. Aren't all of us / waiting to be discovered?"

The poet's answer is sometimes grave, sometimes comic, but always tuned to the incidental music of daily life.

Kathleen Flenniken's poems hav...