Inverted Fire

by Alice Friman

Price 76 pages, $11.95 paper

ISBN 1-886157-07-3

Almost no one is good at both short and long poems, but Alice Friman is. Her poems 'Turnip' and 'Cherries' have sharp language, imagination and alert observation. Inverted Fire is good, a must. --Leo Connellan

Alice Friman's poems are among the finest contemporary poetry has to offer--sustaining the dramatic language of a 'wildness that burns,' cupping that fierce song in graceful forms that hold and heal like lullabies. Here is the embodiment of 'truth and beauty'--form and content melded in a 'balance for weighing the soul.' Myth and lyric married, all affectation spurned, idiomatic speech rides elegiac rhythms. For those who love poetry, this is home. --Marilyn Kallet

Alice Friman's sensuous poems edify, surprise and amuse. She is a poet who can capture the pain of loss and chart and route recovery with equal skill. Read. --Diana Der-Hovanessian

Alice Friman was born in New York City and has lived in Indianapolis since 1960. She is a professor emerita of English at the University of Indianapolis, and in 1996 she received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission. Her collection Zoo was published in 1999 by the University of Arkansas Press.

A recorded interview with this author is available from New Letters on the Air.