At once polished, wild, and bewitching, this provocative collection reads like a stack of saved secret letters. Here, Catherine Pritchard Childress has drawn back the curtains of the inner sanctums of the religious South and borne witness to the extraordinary complexity, the largess, of ostensibly small lives. These poems disrupt, they trouble patriarchal waters, and they ask two things: What really happens to women who dissent, and are you strong enough to wonder?
— Shawna Kay Rodenberg, author of Kin: A Memoir
Outside the Frame is a book of women’s voices, some singing, some crying, and some raging at cruel fate, all of them searching for 'evidence/that we stood together in paradise.' These poems pursue the truths that transcend time and place, that bind us together in the experiences of love, heartache, and attunement that matter most in life. I rarely have read a new volume of poetry that moves me as much as this one does, a book that makes me immediately think of other poets I need to share it with, how I will teach it in my classes, and what I can learn from it to enlarge my own work. Outside the Frame may be a debut collection of poems, but Pritchard Childress ingrains it with the wisdom and heart of many lifetimes closely studied, deeply felt, and masterfully rendered. Once read, these wonderful poems will not be forgotten.
— Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days
While many of these poems are set explicitly in the Appalachian South, it is terrain that Plath or Sexton would recognize. With humor, sensitivity, and sometimes rage, Pritchard Childress transforms old (and young) wives’ tales into a volume of lyrical lives of domestically marginalized saints and s(p)inners.
— Maria Dahvana Headley, author of Beowulf: A New Translation
'Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there,' says Rumi. So the poems in Outside the Frame find rhythms of care and judgement. Catherine Pritchard Childress sings them into women’s songs, humans’ songs, bound to place and tradition, but not to time. These are songs of attention. She gathers them here for release.
— Leah Naomi Green, author of The More Extravagant Feast
Outside the Frame is a compelling accounting of the life of a woman bursting from her skin, pushing back against constant attempts at restraint, at expectations that inhibit her...These poems are not angry, cynical, sneering, or petty; the voice is wise and generous. But the message is very clear: she will not become a 'roadside field burned to dry dust' by this world, and the world is better for it.
— Rita Sims Quillen, author of Some Notes You Hold
What I love in this collection is the intersection of home and belief, of innocence and experience. The poems in Outside the Frame stray between wound and wonder, observed from the 'cloister' of the blue ridge where the speaker is at once a child and a mother, where persona and the personal are intertwined in the confrontation of trauma and beauty. Hymns and rock-n-roll are equally sacred in these poems as Pritchard Childress turns her ear toward the music found in the everyday of family and in the myths that sustain us. Ultimately, these poems complicate the notion of rurality as simple or isolated and offer up a wish to bind each of us, 'Let pared heart bear no bruise nor scar.'
— Matthew Wimberley, author of Daniel Boone’s Window
