We are delighted to be welcoming Frances Cannon to join the Poetry Wales team as our new Reviews Editor. Franky’s first reviews section will be in our Winter 2025 issue.
Franky Cannon
As well as being our Reviews Editor, Franky is an editorial reader for The Kenyon Review, and an affiliated scholar at Kenyon College, where she recently completed the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellowship. She is the author and illustrator of several books: Walter Benjamin: Reimagined, MIT Press, The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank, Gold Wake Press, Tropicalia, Vagabond Press, Fling Diction, with Green Writers Press, and Queer Flora, Fauna, Funga, forthcoming with Valiz Press. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Iowa and a BA from the University of Vermont.
A note from Franky:
“I am thrilled to join the Poetry Wales team as Reviews Editor. I enjoy book reviews as much as I enjoy reading the books themselves, sometimes more so.
Reviews are an essential component of the literary community—they act as the bridge between poet and reader, dissolving the boundaries between the often exclusive and insular realms of academia and literature to a wider audience. One of my favourite ways to spend my time is to wander around a bookshop reading the handwritten reviews by booksellers and shopkeepers, and the first page that I turn to in The New Yorker is the ‘Briefly Noted’ section, featuring pithy reviews of three contemporary books across genres. My aim at Poetry Wales will be to champion marginalised and formerly overlooked voices in poetry, and to make space for a rigorous, nuanced, and respectful discourse. My hope is to celebrate emerging and established poets alike, and to pair reviews of Welsh poets alongside international voices for a more diverse and rich representation.
Although it’s cliché, particularly in the context of a new position with Poetry Wales, one of the most formative poets of my literary education has been Dylan Thomas. A substitute teacher introduced my class to Under Milk Wood when I was 16 years old, and I fell into a nearly devotional obsession with his work. Since then, my tastes broadened and shifted towards modern and contemporary—Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton—and my current favorites poets who are living and writing today—CA Conrad, Richard Siken, Sharon Olds, Robert Hass, Robyn Schiff, Vievee Francis, and Kathleen Jamie; the list proliferates daily. I look forward to encountering new work through this position, and to facilitating connections within the poetry community of Wales and around the world.”
You can get in touch with Franky to pitch a review or send information about a book to be considered for review at reviews@poetrywales.co.uk.
Please note that we kindly ask that you do not send physical review copies to our office.