My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again celebrates the contradictions and quandaries of contemporary American life. These subversive, frequently self-mocking narrative poems are by turns funny and serious, book-smart and street-smart, lyrical and colloquial. Set in Philadelphia, Paris and New Jersey, the poems are at ease with sex happiness and sex trouble, girl-talk and grownup married life, genre parody and antiwar politics, family warfare and family love. Unsentimental but full of emotion, Daisy Fried's new collection, a finalist for the 2005 James Laughlin Prize, is unforgettable.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Fried's vivacious sophomore effort is a breath of pure oxygen for the serious, politically engaged, unpretentious free-verse storytelling so popular in American poetry a generation ago and in eclipse since. Moving from her own bourgeois-bohemian domesticity to the tough kids of inner-city Philadelphia, Fried (She Didn't Mean to Do It) revives the personal anecdote and the narrative incident through wit, a sterling ear and a prosaic patience. In the title poem, Fried's brother goes to jail for his involvement in left-wing street protests; elsewhere Fried (who teaches at Smith College but flaunts her Philly connections) describes a first boyfriend, the sorrows of minimum-wage work, her aging left-wing Jewish aunts and the three things that have ever made her husband cry. Fried's opening poem takes the form of a message left on an answering machine; "Jubilate South Philly: City 14" adopts Christopher Smart's famous quasi-biblical praise poetry to describe a sassy pregnant teen, while "The Hawk" finds the right symbol to protest the Patriot Act. Winningly personal, the poems are nevertheless artful, with a light touch to balance their heavy subjects of social and racial injustice, closer perhaps to Grace Paley than to Philip Levine. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Daisy Fried’s poetry is fluid and quicksilver as life seen close up. Here is an original voice: provocative, poignant, and often very funny.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“Fried’s vivacious sophomore effort is a breath of pure oxygen for the serious, politically engaged, unpretentious free-verse storytelling so popular in American poetry a generation ago and in eclipse since. Winningly personal, the poems are nevertheless artful, with a light touch to balance their heavy subjects of social and racial injustice.”
--Publishers Weekly
--Publishers Weekly
“The satirical tone here is delicious and the social observation is shrewd.”
--Poetry Magazine
--Poetry Magazine
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting sophomore collection.,
By
This review is from: My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Daisy Fried, My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh, 2006)
The most impressive thing about Daisy Fried's My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again is the plethora of voices she takes on-- convincingly-- in these seventy-two pages of poems. By the end of the book, it's likely you'll have no idea what race or religion she is (and I'm only guessing at the sex because of the name, to be honest). The washed-out author photo on the back doesn't help much, which I assume was the intent. What I could glean was that Daisy Fried is from Philadelphia, and that she can write. DOLL RITUAL Spanking the bad, kissing the good ones, that's a thrill, poor things. Mornings I lay out all the teds and dollies with their bald spots, coy looks, rag bodies, hysterical eyes. Some with chewed off noses. Some, patches where snot, pee, has dried. The one I name Ti-Anne, my favorite, my doll afraid of all the others, with broken eyelids supposed to flip up stuck shut? Her I sit to one side to watch the whippings. Her namesake, Ti-Anne (don't ask), my best enemy (I have lots of enemies, she's the only one I name a doll for) has eyes those same types of hysterical colors, changes them daily. She licks her fingers before she tries to stick them in my eyes. No one yells but someone sings ha ha. "Ti-Anne, Ti-Anne," I call, "you stink!" and you know the bad girl smashes my lunchbox thinking it's my face. I'm thinking about this, I see my pattern: incitement, paralysis, incitement, paralysis. Why can't you ever handle what you start, little girl? See, I have never been poor at all, except just an indigence, also a mendacity, of heart; and the way I think it's otherwise. This is good stuff. Give it a shot, see what you think. ***
7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Slays!,
By Emm (austin) - See all my reviews
This review is from: My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)
I should preface: I don't go out of my way to read poetry. I appreciate the greats (Hughes, Neruda, Eliot) but wouldn't consider myself a Poetry Person. Generally, though, I'm mad for great writing.
That said, this book rocks the f*** out. The poems are deftly lyrical, so you're not put off. They feel fresh and rich at the same time. My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again makes me think that maybe one day, I will consider myself a Poetry Person.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
There's a Trick to this Poetry Business,
By
This review is from: My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Daisy Fried has a trick to writing poetry. You could
do it yourself and be a famous poet. Here it is: all you have to do is lyrically and econmomically take the reader into the heart of a situation. A bar on New Year's Day for instance. You have to put us there with such magical authority that we can smell the beer and the lime-scented cologne. Then when you've got us there (remember the part about being lyrical) you have someone or something speak out with heart-breaking honesty that brings us to our knees. Got it? First, the lyricism-rely on your youth. Then the illusionless honesty-rely on your wisdom. Nothing to it really, you should give it a try. I'll buy your book as soon as it comes out. In the meantime, I'll just read more of Daisy Fried. --Lynn Hoffman, author of New Short Course in Wine,The and bang BANG: A Novel ISBN 9781601640005
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