Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, The Kitchen-Dwellers Testimony is based on a Somali insult: jiko muufo. Translated literally as “kitchen flatbread,” the insult criticizes those women who love domestic work so much that they happily watch bread rise. This collection of poems examines the varied ways women navigate gender roles, while examining praise for success within roles where imagination about female ability is limited. The Kitchen-Dwellers Testimony is about love and longing, divorce, distilled desire, and all the ways we injure ourselves and one another.
Review
The poetry of Daisy Fried practices for a for-real poetry vérité; Fried loves the rough, tumbling texture of vernacular impressionism, all the quirks and idiomatic pell-mell of spoken consciousness. Her poetic voicelong-striding, unpretentious, unsentimentalis anchored by a rock-solid, almost rude, recurrent honesty, intimate as a punch in the arm. The result of Frieds vigorous, forward-rushing style, her passionate and tender social acumen, and her blunt, sensible clarity is a poetry more convincingly in touch with the lived life than almost anyone elses. I go back to her books over and over.”
Tony Hoagland
Review
I, too, dislike it. Daisy Frieds witty take on Womens Poetry isnt what you'd expect. This isnt the grapey communion wine of the sisterhood, but a galling, and galvanic, and gimlet-eyed appraisal of human behavior across a panoply of contexts. To my ear, what Fried does with the American vernacular is matchless: She infuses it with the savage energy that William Carlos Williams was looking for a century ago when he wrote despairingly, We believe that life in America is compact of violence and the shock of immediacy. This is not so. Were it so, there would be a corresponding beauty of the spirit, to bear it witness. Here is a woman who strides across a moonlit back lawn to feed feral kittens she has named Raphael, Gabriel, and Lucifer. Such are the revamped angels in the house of womens poetry. To which I say Amen.”
Ange Mlinko
Review
She was tired of sad modern endings. . . . She narrated things calmly and swiftly, Daisy Fried writes, as her steely narration, calm and swift, dismantles our expectations for poetries that address gender, class, motherhood, politics, and poetries. In sourness a kind of joy, she asserts, and throughout this stunning collection demonstrates this over and again, most strikingly in the beautiful braidings of Attenti Agli Zingari. These poems end as they begin: fiercely, frankly, getting the last word: scomplicated.”
Susan Wheeler
Review
“Passionate, nervy (as in ‘you've got a lot of . . . ’), telegraphic, indecorous, chewy, sharply observed, and smart; this is decidedly not Kathie Lee’s America we’re encountering in Daisy Fried’s wonderful new collection. Off come the pink happy goggles and on come the lights. Be unsettled, it’s quite all right.
Women’s Poetry is bold, joyfully energetic poetry, and most invigorating, even if you’re a guy.”
—August Kleinzahler
Review
“Lyrical, idiosyncratic, electrically gifted, no one writes quite like Daisy Fried, perhaps not even Daisy Fried. The poems come at you with flailing elbows, blurted youthspeak mashed-up with Italianate parlor musings, a unique conjury of angles, rhythms, and rhetorical postures, aswerve, aslant, aflutter, akimbo. This third book extends her range to the long sequence, the epistolary pseudo-poem, and heaven knows what else: don’t think too hard, buy it.”
—Campbell McGrath
Review
The title poem in Frieds dazzling new collection begins I, too, dislike it. / However, and skips down a full stanza before completing the line and lavishly describing a tricked-out Nissan G-TR emerging from a garage. The patently masculine sight sparks an unexpected epiphany in the speaker about desire. In the potent blank spaces between However and the rush of the second stanza, Fried displays her gift for honoring hesitation not as a feminine quirk but more as a necessary pause before reaching enlightenment and sometimes even ecstasy. Fried ponders pregnancy, Italian art, frustrating adjunct teaching jobs, Stendahl, and Henry Kissinger. The final section, Ask the Poetess: An Advice Column, shows wit and range worthy of playwright Wendy Wasserstein. In one of the most memorable exchanges, the oracular, tongue-in-cheek poetess is asked why people write confessional poetry when they could just go to church and confess. With irony and equanimity, she responds, In church confession, Catholics confess their sins. In confessional poetry, persons of all faiths confess how others have sinned against them.”
Booklist
Review
Fried is one of the most engaging contemporary poets writing today, for she is as thoughtful, witty or wise as the best conversationalists. Yet, like two of her favorite poets, Charles Bukowski and Frank OHara, her utter lack of self-consciousness allows her to develop a unique connection with her readers, an intimacy that some poets would cut off their writing hands to replicate. . . .In every one of these poems there is the trademark Fried voice, sure and recognizable as a close confidante who manages to provide you with a slice of life by the way she fractures the story-line and interlineates her reactions and impressions. . . . .For those who like readable, funny, intensely honest poetry, it doesnt get much better than this.”
Against Interpretation
Review
“Fried is a poet who will ‘tense up’ when she hears ‘an affirming poem,’ finding ‘Sourness a kind of joy I try for intricately.’ Her present-tense poems vividly record the impressions of our moment: road rage, smartphones, magnet loops, Facebook, a ‘gun megachurch.’ In ‘Kissinger at the Louvre (Three Drafts),’ the background of a cellphone self-portrait captures ‘a dark figure’ who ‘looks familiar,’ but ‘I look fat in it,’ a tourist decides, ‘And deletes.’ Fried announces she’s not the kind of poet to place Kissinger before ‘The Raft of the Medusa,’ but of course, in making her point, she decorously does just that. ‘Midnight Feeding’ embodies Fried’s ironic resistance to the romantic: taking cat food to a shed, she wears a baby monitor ‘like a Miss America sash’ and ‘nothing / but underpants, flipflops.’ The moon is out, but Fried spurns the poetic impulse: ‘There are too many / stars in poems you have to get drunk to write.’ . . . This is a commanding book, and its first and last poems especially stand out: ‘Torment,’ a biting narrative about narcissistic students, and ‘Ask The Poetess,’ a hilarious parody of advice columns and the poetry business.”
—The New York Times
Review
Whether shes portraying college seniors (fifteen responsible children . . . in attitudes of surrender), Kissinger befuddled by culpability, an Iraq War protest in Rome (naming ourselves/Tourists Against the War), the poetess as advice columnist, or her own pregnancy (The worst discomforts . . . self-pity.), National Book Critics Circle Awards finalist Fried is devastatingly on target and funny in a way that can make you blanch.”
Library Journal
Review
"Daisy Fried displays an intense and refined attention to the troubles of the present moment. Effectively blending the personal with the more universal, she delves into issues surrounding womanhood, but also looks at the troubles of humanhood. . . . British literary critic F. R. Leavis insists on a poetry in touch with its time. . . . Daisy Fried has mastered this, as her poems successfully reflect the contemporary climate."
Coldfront
Review
“I have rarely encountered a young poet whose work was so completely its own thing, was so little influenced by what trend might be elbowing itself forward on the writing campuses. Osman is a worldly and acutely sensitive writer who knows how to reach right through the sequined veil of fashion and put her hand squarely on the readers heart, with frank and candid expression, with unaffected wonder.”—from Ted Koosers preface to Ladan Osmans chapbook,
Ordinary Heaven
Review
“[Ladan Osman] writes out of a passion for language, out of a compelling pleasure and challenge in the potential of the voice to humanize us, or perhaps even better, to affirm our humanity. Osman is a warrior poet, and she is dangerous because she is especially gifted and disciplined about her craft, her technical facility with the poem. This collection offers numerous examples of this skillfulness.”—from the foreword by Kwame Dawes
Review
"In a world that too often plugs its ears to voices it thinks unworthy, Osman shows that it's actually more inappropriate to be decorous."—Kathleen Rooney, Chicago Tribune
Review
“True visionary poets are very rare. Ladan Osman is one. What she sees is extraordinary, and needful.”—Brigit Pegeen Kelly, author of Song and The Orchard
Synopsis
Daisy Fried’s third book of poetry is a book of unsettling, unsettled Americans. Fried finds her Americans everywhere, whether watching Henry Kissinger leave the Louvre, or trapped on a Tiber bridge by a crowd of neo-fascist thugs, or yearning outside a car detailing garage for a car lit underneath by neon lavender . . . She tells their stories with savage energy, wit, humor and political engagement.
About the Author
Daisy Fried is the author of My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She has received Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and the Cohen Award from Ploughshares. Fried reviews poetry books for the New York Times, Poetry, and the Threepenny Review and was awarded Poetry magazine’s Editor’s Prize. She has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and in Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA program. Fried lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.