The Best Secret, by Frances Klein

Poetry, chapbook, 20 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The Best Secret is a micro-chapbook of erasure poems about a love affair. Using Stephen King’s novella The Colorado Kid as its source text, the poems in this collection follow a couple over the course of a year as the seasons change from winter to spring and spring to summer. The poems track the couple from their first meeting, through the head-over heels honeymoon stage, and to the inevitable end of the relationship.

Erasure poetry uses a source text as the raw material from which to unearth new and original meaning. In these poems, the violent mystery of The Colorado Kid is reimagined as a seaside love affair, and a bittersweet one at that.

Frances Klein (she/her) is a poet and teacher writing at the intersection of disability and gender. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook New and Permanent (Blanket Sea 2022). She has been published in So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Vonnegut Memorial Library and Tupelo Press, among others. Klein currently serves as assistant editor of Southern Humanities Review. Readers can find more of her work at https://kleinpoetryblog.wordpress.com/.