Gregory Fraser won the David Austen Award for best poetry manuscript, judged by Stanley Kunitz, at Columbia University. Also a winner of the Donald Barthelme Prize and the James Michener Award for Poetry, Fraser has taught literature, critical interpretation, and creative writing at Wittenberg University and St. John's University.

About Strange Pietá:

"There is something deep and uncompromising, something noble, stubborn, and inconsolable in Gregory Fraser's ruthlessly authentic first book of poems, which takes suffering as its human constant and touchstone. Strange Pietá is a book of experience confronted and shaped into art, and it leaves me shaken, envlivened, transformed."
—Edward Hirsch

"The poems in this book are fine, but not refined into absence. Their tight surfaces control what is being told us. Yet underneath the teem with love and conflict as if lakes covered with ice reveal what they hide. Gregory Fraser knows how to get to the heart of the matter where anguish is uncovered and released as wonder."
—Cynthia Macdonald

"This book—from beginning to end—shows the hand of one who has mastered his craft and lived long enough to have something to say. His subject matter is often painful, but Fraser reminds us how the painful and the beautiful can coexist in something called poetry. This is an important debut."
—Robert Phillips

"Greg Fraser's first book is remarkable in the way it blends passion, compassion, and intelligence. For the reader it's good news; poetry is alive and well."
—Adam Zagajewski