but where is Frank? they asked / while on their laps / the only answer / was a tiny / mysterious / violet

Beguiling, outrageous, playfully morbid and frequently stunning in its surreal flights of imagination, The Book of Frank follows the eponymous figure as he grows from his troubled childhood into an adult travesty of the ostensibly straight family man in a male-dominated world. Along the way, he navigates a series of darkly comic situations, commits acts of grotesque violence, loses his soul in the post and debates boundary lines with a pig. Frank is one of the great literary creations: a man who can declare that ‘however we seek another’s weakness is our tyranny’, as often touchingly innocent as he is monstrously cruel.

The Book of Frank is one of the crucial poetic works of this century so far. Now, on the thirtieth anniversary of the first Frank poems’ appearance, it is published in the UK for the first time.