A collection of gritty, fresh, and urban prose poetry by Chicagoan Franki Elliot. Franki works in the music promotion industry. This is her first book. "The 44 pieces in Franki Elliott's Piano Rats are like the best kind of chance meetingsweird and unsettling, specific and transformative. They are Frank O'Hara meets Ellen Kennedy, "first kiss" meets "fuck off," "hell" meets "rainstorm," poetry meets prose, narrative meets lyric, trailer park meets city street. But they are also entirely themselves, places where you "remember who you wanted to be."" ~Kathleen Rooney, author of Oneiromance (an epithalamion), managing editor of Rose Metal Press. "Piano Rats is an homage to being stuck between where you've been and where you still might go. It's just that you haven't quite figured out how to escape where you've been and frankly you have know no idea what comes next. And it is this tension of stuckness in all its messy, druggy, sometimes hopeful, youthful confusion that lives here in these poems and explodes across these pages, all oozy and terribly electric." ~Ben Tanzer, author of Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine, 99 Problems, My Father's House, and You Can Make Him Like You, among others. "I want to find Franki Elliot, really find her, and hug her hard and whisper that it is going be okay. I want to push her away because I know she won't believe me, and why should she? I want to hug her because she is wildly honest as she depicts the awkward reality of a twenty-something in Chicago. In Piano Rats you will find a young women drowning in sadness, and not worried about how she can hide it. Franki Elliot exposes what most bury beneath layers of shallow conversations, bottles of alcohol, and innuendo. She will subtly make you love her and hate her in the matter of a few well placed lines." ~Jason Behrands, managing editor of Orange Alert Press.