Philip Fried has published six previous books of poetry, including Early/Late: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, 2011) and Interrogating Water and Other Poems (Salmon, 2014). His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous journals. In addition to writing poetry, he edits The Manhattan Review, an international poetry journal he founded in 1980. Fried lives in New York with his wife, the photographer Lynn Saville.
Philip Fried's Squaring the Circle is humorous and yet also mysterious in its evocation of esoteric physics and theology. The title poem presents a mystic/scientific quest for an impossible geometry as both a vaudevillian historical catastrophe and a way of understanding God. Throughout, Fried uses pastiche and the mashup of texts to explore historical moments and personal history. Behind its many forms and approaches, however, the book conveys the strong sense of a "persona"—the feeling, as Stanley Kunitz once said, that the poet has imagined a person who could write these poems.
Squaring the CircleSalmon Poetry / Dufour Editions
