by Nicolette Costanzo (Author), Alice Lam (Illustrator)
The Frog Poem Project is a book-length poem structured like a textbook, informed by decades of creative research into frog dissection manuals, antique medical textbooks, surgical gynecological texts, visits to a human cadaver anatomy lab, and frog festivals in Rayne, Louisiana and Calaveras County, California. Following an arc from trauma to healing, it is a poetic inquiry that begins with metaphors conjured by examination in a doctor's office and explores the unexpected beauty embedded in clinical and biological terminology around bodies. A response to the temporality of scientific language, it highlights the traces of meaning that remain on the individual and collective level even when vocabulary is lost. As a poem project, it expands the parameters of a traditional collection of poems, creating a space where, through the lens of poetry, multiple genres and diverse disciplines like art and science can coalesce to create new knowledge.
