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About Poisons & Antidotes
In Poisons & Antidotes, life is inhabited by things that kill us and things that save us. But it’s never black and white, because poisons exist on a continuum, each increment representing some gradation of toxicity. Sometimes poison is clearly recognizable; other times it sits side by side with the innocuous, and the borders are blurred.
In this collection, poison is a metaphor for the degree of human connectedness to the world. The delirious voices in the poems are trapped in their own subjectivity, unable to see beyond their own strange stories. Just as poison becomes less virulent across the continuum, the poetic voices acquire a gradual awareness of themselves in relation to their world. By the end of the collection, it is as if human experience also exists on a kind of continuum. The expression of this vast range of experience—with all its subtleties, contradictions and ironies—is the antidote to human disconnectedness.
About the author
Andrea Fry was born in Dallas, raised mainly in New York City and the Catskill Mountains, and educated at Union College and Columbia University. She published her first collection of poems, The Bottle Diggers, in May 2017 (Turning Point Press). Her second collection Poisons & Antidotes (Deerbrook Editions) follows now in 2021. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. She was a finalist in Georgia College’s Arts & Letters Prize contest, a semi-finalist in the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and a semi-finalist in River Styx International Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, Ars Medica, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cimarron Review, The Comstock Review, Graham House Review, The Lake, Plainsongs, Reed Magazine, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stanford Literary Review, St. Petersburg Review, Writers Resist, and the chapbook Still Against War, Poems for Marie Ponsot.
