Gloria Frym, Lies & More Lies

 

Reality

We’re not at the beginning of the beginning. Or at the middle of the beginning. We’re not at the end of the beginning. We’re at the beginning of the middle. It will take some time to reach the middle of the middle. Speaking truth to constituents, we don’t know when we’ll be at the end of the middle. It will take more time to get to the beginning of the end, perhaps forever. We may not be around for it, I mean, when we reach the middle and the end of the end. So finally, it’s a good thing, we believe, to attach people to the new reality.

Self-described as a “wildly honest and forceful collection of prose poems, satires, and short fictions,” Berkeley, California-based poet, fiction writer and essayist Gloria Frym’s latest is Lies & More Lies (Kenmore NY: BlazeVOX [books], 2025), an assemblage of short pieces that form a considerable collection of sharp fictions. Who was it that offered of artists, that we fight laziness and lies in our search for the truth? I hadn’t heard of Frym or her work prior to this collection, but she’s the author of an armload of titles of poetry and prose, including Back to Forth (The Figures, 1982), By Ear (Sun and Moon Press, 1991), How I Learned (Coffee House Press, 1992), Distance No Object (City Lights Books, 1999), The True Patriot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015) and How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays (BlazeVOX, 2020), as well as a book of interviews with women artists, Second Stories (Chronicle Books, 1979).

Across the thirty-five pieces that make up Lies & More Lies, Frym pushes at the boundaries of prose in intriguing ways, offering narratives that stretch and pull at the elastic of the sentence. “Because I made one,” she writes, to open the story “Hunger,” “I wanted to make another. Then there were two, and I wanted a third. My greed grew daily because there were none for such a long a time. I really desired dozens, not content with what was. I knew I was playing with a sharp instrument by wanting a bunch, but Mother always said my eyes were bigger than my stomach.” Frym’s pieces seem very comfortable in that between-space neither short story nor prose poem nor essay but blending all of the above, writing straightforward sentences that bend at the waist, and accumulate into something far beyond. “There’s no need for lips anymore. There’s no need for lipstick,” she writes, to open “Need During the Pandemic,” “wear the same jeans for work, no place for Socratic method on Zoom, no new shoes, no need except for this to be over and out. A day is a one-way street.”