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The Book of the Rotten Daughter
"Friman sees clearly, sharing the painful, sometimes humorous, images of an
aging body—our
mother's, or our own..." — Indianapolis Star
"Finally the body wants its worm," Alice Friman tells us, taking on death,
her parents' or her own—what befalls any one of us eventually—and the grief
that can shatter. These are astonishing poems which fearlessly jump into
hell and out again, that resent or forgive, poems which wryly, exactly and
so richly honor the world of the living.
And that world? Friman,
however brilliant at metaphor and its brief transformation, is an absolute
realist. We enter the poems and know the place. And we can't look away.
—
Marianne Boruch
Alice
Friman's poems are seriously tough cookies, the poet herself "the tough
mother who never quits." Friman is so tough she can see the grim humor
beneath her own stance ("I come from a family of Russians/stubborn as
stumps. Crabby, but we live") and beneath that of others ("Romeo the
nail-biter/swoony behind the lilacs"). She is so tough that she does not
look away ("We have crawled/into our eyes. There is nothing/but what we
see"), so tough that she knows she must look away ("Let us speak of love and
weather/subtracting nothing./Let us put your mother and mine/away for a
while. Your dying father,/my dead one").
Friman's poems are so tough that their tenderness breaks hearts—hers and
ours. She can speak of being "Sixty-five with no end before the end/in
sight. Boiled down to an angry bone/knocking in a soup of dried
grasses/stirred by the hot clang of a wind," yet she knows and believes
"It's beginnings we want.../to keep them in that moon's first
spotlight.../the night air/staggering beneath the weight/of all their
untaken breaths."
The Book of the Rotten Daughter is ripe—and wonder filled.
—
Stephen Corey
Alice Friman, a New York City native, now lives in Milledgeville, Georgia. Her
other books include Zoo (winner of the Ezra Pound Poetry Award,
Inverted Fire, Reporting From Corinth, and
four chapbooks. Her work has appeared in such publications as Poetry, The
Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and The Georgia Review. She is
professor emerita at the University of Indianapolis and presently teaches at
Georgia College & State University, where she is the poetry editor of Arts &
Letters. She lives with her husband, Bruce Gentry, editor of the Flannery
O'Connor Review. She has a website,
www.alicefriman.com.
A recorded interview with this author is available from New Letters on the Air.
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