Diane Frank is an award-winning poet and author of five books of poems, including Entering the Word Temple and The Winter Life of Shooting Stars. Her friends describe her as a harem of seven women in one very small body. She lives in San Francisco – where she dances, plays cello, and creates her life as an art form. Diane teaches at San Francisco State University, leads workshops for young writers as a Poet in the School, and directs the Blue Light Press On-line Poetry Workshop. She is also a documentary scriptwriter with expertise in Eastern and sacred art. Blackberries in the Dream House, her first novel, won the Chelson Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Blackberries in the Dream House

"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

Pierre DeLattre is author of Walking on Air and
Tales of a Dalai Lama

To Order:

Blackberries in the Dream House - $17.95
Books are in stock at Open Secret Bookstore: 415-457-4191;
from 1st World Publishing: 641-209-5000; and Amazon.com
Order at your favorite bookstore using the book code:
ISBN 1-887472-68-1

Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize

Diane Frank Photo

Diane Frank
GeishaPoet@aol.com

Featured Poem

Iowa Omen

Three hawks fly south
   as your voice trembles
      across the great plains.

Fields of sleeping cows
   a gentleness in the land.

Here is the omen:
   Sky splashed with aurora,
      blue stars, curtains of light.

The letters are gold
   on red silk –
      Japanese calligraphy.

If I had the right kind of ink
   I’d write them
      on your skin.

— Diane Frank