Fran Carlen's poetry reads as if it had been written at the turn of the last century, on the continent, had been forgotten, and then found its way to the present day in a steamer trunk; as if a translation of a romance language, where the translation doubles as the original; everyday concerns metamorphose into flirtations with the absurd, and then back to the banal. Voices and wit such as this are difficult to find and more impossible from which to wrest oneself.Fran Carlen lives and works in New York. Her work has previously appeared in journals such as Combo, Fence, The Germ, The Hat, InPrint, Sal Mimeo, and Shiny.