Alice Friman writes her poems with a razor-like intensity. Her metaphors slice through comfortable conventions of nature, family, love, and history. Vultures flock to carrion and “[s]pread / their wings into a tablecloth of frenzy.” A male lion takes a dead leopard’s head “in his jaws, argues it like a cat with a mole.” With equal skill, Friman can also light up quieter moments. A neglected ceiling threatens to crash down “in a blizzard of broken sidewalks,” and in the middle of family tension sits the daughter “curled in the living room chair, the eye / of the storm drowning herself in a book.”
Whether she confronts the ghosts of family, the bewildering violence of nature, or the phantoms of love in the here and now, Friman tears away the gauzy veils with her diamondhard imagination. She never takes her eyes off the subjects, always aware that the beasts are watching, too. Line by line, she takes this frightening, beautiful zoo and offers it up to us in poems that contain but do not strangle the life out of it. The bars of her lines and stanzas bend and tense while animals roar inside. Zoo testifies to the ability of language to make the familiar new in the hands of a skilled maker.
Alice Friman, born in New York City, is professor emerita of English and creative writing at the University of Indianapolis. Published in ten countries and anthologized widely, she has produced seven collections of poetry, including Inverted Fire. Among her numerous honors are three prizes from the Poetry Society of America, a fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission, and the 1998 Ezra Pound Poetry Award for this collection.
Author website.
“Here’s a poet with lively eyes, ears, and imagination. Her poems engrave themselves in memory by their accurate metaphors and sharp details. She can be wild without losing control, tender without ever waxing sentimental.”
—X. J. Kennedy
“Friman dissects flora and fauna: the tropic landscape of Hawai’i and the savannas of Tanzania and Kenya, all roiling with lava, lions, vultures, the picked-over skeletons of zebras, as well as the familial skyline of working-class uncles,… Aunt Sadie, and Daddy in his Depends. Beauty resides here not in prettiness but in a scalpel precision that breaks the heart.”
—Vince Gotera, North American Review
“The book is about the harnessing of wildness—especially in humans…. Friman’s deft use of metaphor and her ability to choose revelatory detail are equally compelling…. A meditation on the frailty of permanence and the permanence of frailty, Friman’s passionate and passionately honest collection demonstrates the tremendous power of this seasoned poet.”
—Andrea Hollander Budy, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
“This zoo is the entire planet Earth, tracing its mathematically measured dance through the spheres, carrying a crazy-quilt cargo of creatures and visions, casting shadows and darkness before it…. Its fearsome wonders perform as their DNA and destinies command, usually indifferent to the effects on their fellow passengers, sometimes finding pleasure in cruelty….It is a beautiful book, this Zoo, a collection of poems of maturity, filled with wisdom and delight and fearsome wonders.”
–Charlotte Sargeant, Indianapolis Star
“For Friman, everything is fair game; and everything is fully dimensional. While there are self-referential moments, they are not confessional; we want to know what she’s thinking, following her eye along the trail of a safari, the movement of a constellation, the slide of breasts on an aging chest. As a result, we find art that is fully dimensional. Instead of being self-satisfying, these poems have an emotional depth balanced by the sharp edges of language, slick and laserlike. And often on these journeys we find ourselves.”
—Julie Pratt McQuiston, NUVO Newsweekly (Indianapolis)
