Customer Reviews

ZOO

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In "Trasformations," one of the poems in her latest book, Zoo, Alice Friman writes "My resident spider/sways in the silk grocery of her wheel,/weaving another language than what I know...." Luckily for us, Friman's language is poetry, and what she observes of the human condition is worth listening to for its newness, its visceral surprises. It is a language textured rich and sassy, sometimes painfully poignant as in Mary's Boys and Wrapping Up the Lost, the middle sections of the book dealing with ancestry, the loss and love of family. Friman's Zoo also takes the reader from the landscapes of Indiana to the plains of Africa and the coastal waters of Hawaii in poems layered with history, the natural violence of the animal world, and all the metaphorical wonders therein of a skillful and, at times, wondrous poet. In my opinion, the women are outdoing the men these days in the realm of poetry, and Alice Friman is one of the great doers in a very prolific period of publishing.