Customer Reviews

She Didn't Mean To Do It (Pitt Poetry Series)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Continual surprise is this book's best gift: line to line and page to page, you never know what Daisy Fried might say, or where her hungry imagination might veer next. Musically, the poems are jazzy and thickly textured free verse. Thematically, there's nothing unduly cautious here, no tiresome solemnity: here is "the essential gaudiness of poetry," in Wallace Stevens's words. Fried is eminently readable and frequently delightful in both thought and tune.

This book is full of attitude, negative, positive, indifferent. There is a self-delighting energy, sometimes comic, sometimes trenchant, and a lot of eye-catching first lines: "I never was much good at blow jobs," "Oh she was sad oh she was sad." These and others clearly indicate the femininity of the poetry. It is a feminism that is full of erotic pleasure and (I suspect) unthreatening to men, who are bound to respond affirmatively to the sass (I know because I tried out a few of the poems on my boyfriend). An altogether impressive debut.

With all due respect, are these other reviewers clouded by hormones, fashionably scornful, or just full of popsicles? Come ON! Daisy Fried is one of the most original voices to hit the planet. Who does she sound like? Nobody! She is the champ of anti-chick poems, writing unsentimentally about what girls care about; she is the original combo plate, truly funny and truly feeling at once. The sound of her work is rhythmic, musical; she's got the beat of real life underneath it all. She SEES and her writing shows it. The woman's got nerve and verve to spare. I could eat for these poems for days and find something new in them to love. I look forward to more from this fresh in every sense writer.

This is a wonderful debut--poems about city life of all kinds but especially as regards young women's experience. It's a politically aware book that doesn't just gaze at its own navel, and it's beautifully written. I can't disagree more with the previous reviewer, but here's the whole of the poem she quotes from. Decide for yourself.

2000

New Years Eve, its 6 p.m. Bar door
on the corner opens and closes, its just
silver slipping and slamming but first
a run of heat through the door, the shine
in the black of spigots and mirrors
and bottles and desire without method
and two men on some stools, womanless, elbows
slid together, cardboard hats reading ew Yea
in glitter that rains down and the door
shuts. Puddles by the curb, a little jazz
of rain. A girl down there showing her teeth
to a man, her voice all made of sirens
and rocks and dirty butter and cheap stockings,
preg again or out of dope or dont hit me
or dont leave me or what will I do
or take me with you and silence. Where the
wind goes when there is no wind. What
you will never be because you dont know
how to want to. If you cannot take me
under cover of night, if you cannot save
the whole world, what will become of me?

This is a book I wish I'd written. Since I didn't, I'll settle for reading it (three times so far). It's nervy, urban (but accessible to me, who grew up on the edge of cornfields), funny as hell, and has language sharp and bright as glass. There's no pretention here, and there's a real ground-level view of city life, personal life, and politics made personal. Alternately gorgeous, funny, politically subtle but profound. Also very solidly crafted.

Poems leave you with a daze or should when they're good like you
have been amazingly changed in a small way. These seem like they
try too hard like they are too obvious so you don't feel like that. At least I didn't. I like the use of the words, I just didn't find them clicking together in a way that made them more than just the words. I'm not a major expert or English person; somebody gave me this. So some of what other people are saying goes over my head. But I guess I shouldn't have to be an expert to "get this" or have it get to me.

Take the following passages from a poem as examples:

"and two men on some stools, womanless, elbows
slid together, cardboard hats reading "ew Yea""

"A girl down there showing her teeth to
a man...preg again or out of dope or don't hit me
or don't leave me or what will I do"

This is poetry about being down and out by someone who has probably only seen it from a safe vantage trying to fake it and be a little "too cool." This revels in the sensational, does a little pseudo-feminist flaunting, which some might find "liberating" and others titillating. But mostly this slums, sometimes quite cleverly, but always with a cool distance. I don't believe the sympathy for others, and suspect the poet doesn't deep down either. I found the more introspective pieces a little more honest, but in the end I guess overall I find the pathos too easy, too borrowed and the underlying voyeurism in this a little vexing. I guess I found myself in the end not convinced.

I have this book, which I recommend, and when I saw the review below, I couldn't figure out what this reviewer was talking about. I looked up the poem he/she bases her whole criticism on, which is called "Romance Novel," and the reviewer has quoted it wrong. Does he/she need new reading glasses? The phrase is "the industrial laundry's heady bleach/dizz seeped into the gray-gold street," not "eeped." I don't know why a single word would make somebody hate a book of poetry anyway, but whatever. I think this is a very good, fresh book of poetry.

don't waste your time reading this collection because there is nothing fresh or worthwhile within these pages. here's an example:

The industrial laundry's heady bleach
dizz eeped into the gray gold street I
walked alone. As if a bird formed it-
self out of my breastbone and flew off. As

if I walked through stands of blasted cedars
shaking down sapped drops of leftover rain
from prehistoric crooks and limb lops-

Breast. Mouth. Thigh. Zipper. Cream.
Repeat.
Breast. Mouth. Thigh. Zipper. Cream.

Make babies. Here come the babies. The End.

i'm guessing that daisy thought she was being inventive but she comes off more as a hack. she probably thought "bleach
dizz eeped" sounded cool. maybe if she would spend more time with her craft and not with trying to sound hip then maybe this collection would be worth your time.