Jim Frazee’s Thief of Laughter is an intimate and evocative collection of poetry that scrapes raw nerves and lays bare the fragility of identity, memory, and family. The book weaves through a lifetime of emotional collisions. Fathers and sons, adolescent cruelty, war and its ghosts, spiritual betrayals, and fleeting moments of tenderness. Frazee captures these with a poet’s sharp eye and a survivor’s haunted voice, his language pulling no punches and never hiding behind pretense.

Frazee’s style is straightforward, sure-footed, but packed with layers. What struck me hardest was how many of the poems felt like emotional snapshots. The kind you can’t put back in the album once you’ve touched them. The violence of silence in “My Father’s Lesson,” the unspeakable grief tucked into “Elegy for E,” or the nearly unbearable self-loathing and regret that pulses through “Jell-O,” these pieces didn’t ask for sympathy. They earned it.

And yet, Frazee doesn’t let the darkness smother you. There’s a strange grace to his honesty. The title poem, “Thief of Laughter,” might be one of the most potent explorations of intergenerational pain I’ve read in a long time. It’s unflinching. Still, there’s beauty in the precision of his images and a kind of quiet rebellion in his insistence on remembering. Even when he writes about cruelty towards himself, others, or from the world at large, there’s a current of compassion, sometimes bitter, sometimes soft, running beneath it all.

If you’ve ever grappled with your past, questioned the people who raised you, or wondered what ghosts still rattle around in your own head, this book might sting, but it’ll also speak to you. I’d recommend Thief of Laughter to anyone who’s lived long enough to lose something important.

Pages: 156 | ASIN : B0F3KNLJ3P