A Review of Daniel Lassell’s Frame Inside a Frame
(Texas Review Press, September 2025)
by Susan L. Leary
The title of Daniel Lassell’s newest collection, Frame Inside a Frame, captures the primary thematic concern of these poems: the speaker’s deep reverence for seeing, for looking again and again at one’s experience from as many angles as possible, that is, frame after frame after frame. In fact, many of the poem titles are “Frame” or “Frame Inside a Frame” or even “Seven Frames Inside a Frame” to reinforce this hyperfocus on perceiving as thoroughly and as accurately as possible. There’s an intrinsic hopefulness in this activity. Perception speaks to what is available to us. It suggests abundance, that the material of our lives is rife with possibility, that even the grass or the air or the sunlight retains a significance worthy of attention. In “Trodden Canvas,” this opportunity to gain insight is on full display:
I crane from my rented porch
to sift clarity where the mower
has shaved over high grass,
blades churning and yielding
perception,
one at a time, for a time.
The potential for multiple perspectives outweighs certainty, so this process persists ad infinitum. Many poems bear the repeated phrase of “and so,” which suggests that while seeing with rigor is ambitious and laborious, it is still worthwhile, and the speaker never exhausts himself in the attempt. Even the concept of frame inside a frame is telling. Each frame refracts another. Each viewpoint deepens rather than narrows: we interpret, and then we interpret those interpretations. The speaker’s awareness of his positioning in this meaning-making enterprise is reinforced by Lassell’s rejection of intact, readily available answers in favor of fragments, threshold spaces, and further questions. The haiku, “Hope Tithe,” is a consummate example: “a handful of leaves / offered into the mail slot / of a church’s door.” Here, there is the generosity of an image readying itself for view, but to what end? To affirm our existence, emphasized by the final lines of the collection: “We seek; we become, // our true outliving.”
“The Glassmaker’s Bench” dramatizes this relationship between intention and outcome. Similar to perception, the glassmaking process is delicate, elusive, and unpredictable, and in this poem, the bench serves as a metaphorical site upon which the glassmaker’s vision is both enacted and tested. “Such devotion and tenacity, this shaping…” yet all efforts prove futile as “[i]n the end, the hardened object is a fragile object…” and the bench is either the glassmaker’s “giving” or his “failure,” nothing more. Even our most deliberate, well-meaning creations—or perceptions—are vulnerable to mistakes, criticism, and condemnation, the glassmaker’s spiritual and practical livelihood hinging upon his ability to lean into the disconnect between “[w]hat the bench sees, and what it hopes to see.” In this way, perception aspires as much as it reveals.
Interestingly, while these poems celebrate the capacity to perceive and to understand, they also celebrate the complete obliteration of meaning and purpose, noted outright in the opening poem, “Frame,” in which the speaker fantasizes about the end of all things, happily descending into the underworld, where he will be “…surrounded with a constant / emptying…” and “…fruition / will not matter.” In fact, it is through images of wreckage, destruction, and loss that Lassell delivers many of the collection’s wisest, most deep-feeling lines. For example: “Home is anywhere made hollow.” “…[N]othingness is a mercy / and absence is something sacred.” “We sought no utopia, / but a room next to it.” Furthermore, in “Museum of Exits,” Lassell presents a dismal, unsettling, and catastrophic scene that is in stark contrast with the earlier image of leaves gently slid inside the church’s mail slot:
In rain,
a hollowing cow’s carcass,
oily and floating,
sweeps with bottles and toasters
onto a lawn.
While this moment may not inspire immediate action, it certainly gives pause, holding the speaker’s gaze as much as our own because we recognize instinctually that what remains after destruction is often more sincere than what stood before. We simply cannot look away, and though the rain, the carcass, and the bottles do not provide answers, they call to mind the power of clarification, of wiping the slate clean and readjusting. In this way—and precisely because of its brokenness—ruin also figures as a readjustment, a different but equally vital permutation of life, in which the speaker discovers an undeniable point of reference. “Mirror” offers a potent example of this essential shape-shifting: “The clouds heave rain. / I look into puddles / and find in them / myself.” And later, in the collection’s fifth iteration of “Frame”: “Am I lifted from the wreckage?” // No, the wreckage is in you.”
These moments of identification cast additional light on the speaker’s ongoing quest to arrive at a viable form of self-possession, one in which his efforts to perceive as exhaustively as possible yield the ability to “…notice at last // not any god / that crafts humanity,” but rather humanity’s ability to animate itself. This marks a pivotal shift in the collection from perception through the lens of selfhood to subjectivity as a shared condition. For this reason, Lassell’s poems unfold through the use of pairings, or juxtapositions, with a strong emphasis on the porousness of their boundaries—for example, the body and the earth and self and other—to signal that once perspective is freed from the limits of the gaze, we will know all entities are perceiving entities. In particular, rural landscapes abound, presenting us with hickory trees, llamas, squirrels, fields, soil, even farm equipment that is capable of comprehension and the communication of feeling, as in the poem, “Abandoned Farm Machinery”:
On dithering nights, you will hear
a rattling sob coming from
those fields, calling out to their farmers,
recounting when they could not
despite all pleading and curse,
muster another year’s harvest.
Here, Lassell moves from identification to witness to vocalization of a common plight, his speaker extending an affirming and empathetic hand across the ether: “I see a penned landscape, / an inscription of scattered reality […] My shadow is also yours.”
Thus emerges an unexpected unity: Lassell’s interest in how we see, but even more so, how we see together, that is, perception as a collective act. Poetry is a way of seeing, as well, a compressed, pulsating, “scattered reality” that invites multiple readings, thrives on mystery, and resists resolution. It is a dynamic, metaphorical, and imagistic lens to which each reader brings their own set of circumstances that are infinitely relevant. In this way, Frame Inside a Frame figures as a primer on poetry itself. Each frame figures as a gesture towards infinity. Each frame holds multiple worlds that coalesce. Lassell’s poems are also beautifully spare, precise, unornamented, and against the vast white space of the page, language is measured and visible, recalling “Temple of Salt,” one of the collection’s many erasures of the Book of Genesis, in which the speaker offers this final insight: “there is none so wise / as Art // hand upon hand / bare unto all."
Daniel Lassell is the author of Spit, winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, Ad Spot and The Emptying Earth. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Arkansas International, Colorado Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. Raised in Kentucky, he now lives in Bloomington, IN.
Susan L. Leary is the author of More Flowers (Trio House Press, forthcoming February 2026); Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press, 2024), selected by Kimberly Blaeser to win the 2023 Louise Bogan Award; and the chapbook, A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Indiana Review, The Arkansas International, Cream City Review, Smartish Pace, Harpur Palate, Diode Poetry Journal, and Verse Daily. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami and lives in Indianapolis, IN.