This collection explores territory where poems haven't dared to venture-the toxic side of the Information Age as it veers out of control. Its three-poem introduction and book-length sonnet sequence draw inspiration from the sonnet's origins to update it for the Digital Age. Linked from its earliest days with legal proceedings and a modern psychology of conflicted love, the sonnet held together what wanted to fly apart. Acknowledging this tradition of warring but tightly bound forces, Fried re-conceives the contemporary sonnet as an arena where fragments of self and samples of lingo play off against one another. And coloring these contests is a love intrigue that implicates the reader.

Cohort

Literature & Fiction

Fried, Philip

Poetry

Salmon Poetry

Philip Fried's first collection of poetry, Mutual Trespasses (Ion), recounted the fantasies, adventures, and mishaps of a character named God. In Quantum Genesis, he completes the God series and writes about a variety of other outsiders.

Quantum Genesis: And Other Poems

Zohar Pr

Early/Late: New and Selected Poems draws from Philip Fried's previous four collections of poetry. These highly praised books explored such themes as the tribulations of a vulnerable deity and the intersection of personal myth and historical moment. The new poems, in a section titled "The Emanation Crunch," are haunted by the current financial turmoil and possessed by the disembodied voices that multiply in our world of simulacra. "This skillful and memorable first selection can seem like the work of three or four different poets, thought wit and civility hold it together."-Publishers Weekly

Early/Late: New & Selected Poems

Phillip Fried's sixth collection. A humorous and yet also mysterious 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. Fried lives in New York with his wife, the photographer Lynn Saville.

Squaring the Circle

&#65279;In Among the Gliesians, Philip Fried continues experimenting with different registers of language, technical jargon, and a variety of literary and non-literary forms, ranging from sonnet, ballad, acrostic, and villanelle to press release and report. His witty and compassionate work takes on a new urgency, however, as he focuses on our alarming present situation. Dealing with such topical themes as mass shootings, nuclear gamesmanship, and threats to democracy, Fried's poems reveal a struggle for meaningful expression when meaning itself is under attack. In the section giving its title to the book, reports on an extraterrestrial society hold up a mirror to our own culture.

Among the Gliesians

Literary