Blackberries in the Dream House

Reviews and Endorsements

"What would happen to us if we were to undertake the discipline of turning our life entirely and self-consciously, into a poem? Through Yukiko, who becomes both a contemplative Buddhist and a geisha skilled in the refinements of sensuous pleasure, Diane Frank allows us to live within the soul of a young woman who has undertaken to create a life imagined and expressed as a poem, in every moment, waking and sleeping, making love or meditating. With its power of language, Blackberries in the Dream House will seduce many readers into considering whether a prosaic life is the only choice we have."

Pierre DeLattre
Author of Walking on Air and Tales of a Dalai Lama

"Diane Frank's exquisite sensibility manifests throughout in Blackberries in the Dream House; it is both erotic and metaphysical. In fact, her great strength is that for her there's no division between the two. The result is this fine lyrical novel."

Stephen Dunn
Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet

"Reading Blackberries in the Dream House is like reading one continuous prose poem. You step into a floating world of piercing beauty, wild magic, and earth-shaking emotions. For days I walked around dazed, lost in the dream."

Caree Connet
Award Winning Poet

"Blackberries in the Dream House gets to you like a caress from the most longed-for and tender of lovers. It turns you on and heals your heart. Diane Frank is a poet goddess whose exquisite incantation will leave you naked in your own sacred house of dreams."

Alan James Mayer
Talk Show Host, Radio Producer

"The novel meets the poem in this lovely book with the most exquisite seamlessness. The beauty of language and image Diane Frank is able to maintain, line after line, seems to flirt with the miraculous."

Nancy Berg
Award Winning Poet

"When you remove everything that is not necessary, something glows underneath.' This novel glows with Diane Frank's poetic and visionary wisdom, through an erotic journey illuminating universal cycles of birth, death and rebirth. After having immersed yourself in the sacred lives of Yukiko, a geisha, and the young monk, Kenji, in an older, artistically flowering Japan, you might feel, as I did, along with Yukiko, 'My feet are slices of melon, birds curling over rocks. Where have they taken me now?"

Diane Averill
Author of Beautiful Obstacles

"Blackberries in the Dream House is a passionate novel written by a poet. It is told using deeply saturated images by a woman who lives with vibrating intensity. Frank has a keen eye for the terror and majesty of falling in love, and a kind heart for the circuitous paths the heart takes to escape."

Terry Brennan
Reviewer, The Chicago Reader

"Blackberries in the Dream House reads like an altered state of consciousness. Its powerful language and exotic love story combine to create a deep impression that lasts far beyond the end of the book."

John Kremer
Author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books