Alice Friman's latest collection, Vinculum, roots for deep connections between people, nature, retrospection, and the inevitable biological destiny of the body. Friman's work branches out from the core poem, "The Mythological Cod," to form a trellis of revelations on religion, sex, humor, science, and history. Her poems embrace the painful uncertainty of existence and relationships with clear-cut precision. The defiance and directness of Vinculum is matched by its musicality, creating a rich but fragile weave of human attachment.

Vinculum: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Friman, Alice

Poetry

LSU Press

The View from Saturn endeavors to look at the earth and our life on it from two perspectives at once: objectively, as if from a great distance, and subjectively, focusing in on the body with all its cells and hungers. Alice Friman's poems dance between these two vantage points, asking the important questions: What does it all mean, and what have we become, standing in the midst of the destruction we've wrought by "watching the unthinkable going on"?
With dark humor and lyric honesty, The View from Saturn provides both a telescopic and microscopic look at ourselves, exploring how in our smallness and perhaps foolishness we are still capable of attaining a measure of nobility.

The View from Saturn: Poems

Blood Weather, Alice Friman’s sharply etched new collection of poetry, reminds readers that times of reckoning are marked by blood: the knife, the sword, the cutting word. Blood runs through our history, stories, religion, and art, and we cannot help but play our part by adding to the storm of “fang and claw” and its inherent sorrow. Friman traces this unending path through biblical tales, the war of the sexes, the continuum of art, and her own family and personal life. Her poems reflect on figures ranging from Lady Macbeth―whom Friman sees in the blood-red tree outside her bedroom window―to Cain and Abel in the biblical account of the first murder, through Judge Judy’s frustrations when faced with the death of a marriage, to the poet herself as a child learning to read “the ancient writing of the butcher block / streaked with cuts and sacrifice” and the butcher’s hands, “blunt-fingered and stained.” By turns stark and resilient, the poems in Blood Weather draw on tragic themes and painful memories to evoke the tumult of human nature.

Blood Weather: Poems

On the Overnight Train collects a lifetime of thought and writing by Alice Friman, presenting poems of passion and permission, gravity and humor, alongside a great deal of truth telling peppered with the salt of invention. Here even the dead clink glasses and remain as alive and present as ever. Here the old stories abide and the new ones, written at the tail end of a life, face the inevitable with clear-eyed candor, wit, and grace. As Stephen Corey writes in his introduction, ?Friman?s poetry is still kicking ass and breaking hearts as she steams toward ninety,? and On the Overnight Train captures the world of a distinctive poet whose work is vivid, understandable, and emotionally honest.

On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems

Humor & Satire

Reporting from Corinth

Barnwood Pr Cooperative

Driving for Jimmy Wonderland

Barnwood

Her metaphors slice through comfortable conventions of nature, family, love, and history. Vultures flock to carrion and "spread / their wings into a tablecloth of frenzy." A male lion takes a dead leopard's head "in his jaws, argues it like a cat with a mole." With equal skill, Friman can also light up quieter moments. A neglected ceiling threatens to crash down "in a blizzard of broken sidewalks," and in the middle of family tension sits the daughter "curled in the living room chair, the eye / of the storm drowning herself in a book." Whether she confronts the ghosts of family, the bewildering violence of nature, or the phantoms of love in the here and now, Friman tears away the gauzy veils with her diamond-hard imagination. She never takes her eyes off her subjects, always aware that the beasts are watching, too. Line by line, she takes this frightening, beautiful zoo and offers it up to us in poems that contain but do not strangle the life out of it. The bars of her lines and stanzas bend and tense while animals roar inside. Zoo testifies to the ability of language to make the familiar new in the hands of a skilled maker.

Zoo: Poems

University of Arkansas Press

Poetry. "Almost no one is good at both short and long poems, but Alice Friman is. Her poems 'Turnip' and 'Cherries' have sharp language, imagination and alert observation. INVERTED FIRE is good, a must" --Leo Connellan.

INVERTED FIRE

History & Criticism

BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City

Poetry. Women's studies. Alice Friman's THE BOOK OF THE ROTTEN DAUGHTER contains "astonishing poems which fearlessly jump into hell and out again, that resent or forgive," writes poet Marianne Boruch, "poems which wryly, exactly and so richly honor the world of the living." Friman draws on her experience as caregiver for her aging mother and father, exploring such topics as nursing homes, osteoporosis, guilt, grief, the enduring power of familial relationships and the transcendent power of art. "The book isn't about death but about the living's reaction to it," Friman says. "The 'Rotten Daughter' has at least pulled something out of the fire. She has created something."

The Book of the Rotten Daughter: poems

BkMk Press

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Books by Friman, Alice