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. (Author photo by Pierce Backes)

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Daisy Fried’s third poetry collection 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.

"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 voice—long-striding, unpretentious, unsentimental—is anchored by a rock-solid, almost rude, recurrent honesty, intimate as a punch in the arm. The result of Fried’s 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 else’s. I go back to her books over and over.”
—Tony Hoagland

“‘I, too, dislike it’. Daisy Fried’s witty take on Women’s Poetry isn’t what you'd expect. This isn’t 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 women’s poetry. To which I say Amen.”
—Ange Mlinko