"Visitation Rights"
from Alice Friman's
The Book of the Rotten Daughter

Alice Friman:

Alice Friman, a New York City native, now lives in Milledgeville, Georgia. Her other books include Zoo (winner of the Ezra Pound Poetry Award), Inverted Fire, Reporting from Corinth, and four chapbooks. Her work has appeared in such publications as Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and The Georgia Review. She is professor emerita at the University of Indianapolis and presently teaches at Georgia College & State University, where she is the poetry editor of Arts & Letters. She lives with her husband, Bruce Gentry, editor of the Flannery O'Connor Review. (Photo by Lillian Elaine Wilson)

About The Book of the Rotten Daughter:

"Alice Friman's poems are seriously tough cookies, the poet herself 'the tough mother who never quits.' Friman is so tough she can see the grim humor beneath her own stance ('I come from a family of Russians / stubborn as stumps. Crabby, but we live') and beneath that of others ('Romeo the nail-biter / swoony behind the lilacs'). She is so tough that she does not look away ('We have crawled / into our eyes. There is nothing / but what we see'), so tough that she knows she must look away ('Let us speak of love and Weather / subtracting nothing. / Let us put your mother and mine / away for a while. Your dying father, / my dead one').

"Friman's poems are so tough that their tenderness breaks hearts – hers and ours. She can speak of being 'Sixty-five with no end before the end / in sight. Boiled down to an angry bone / knocking in a soup of dried grasses / stirred by the hot clang of a wind,' yet she knows and believes 'It's beginnings we want... / to keep them in that moon's first spotlight... / the night air / staggering beneath the weight / of all their untaken breaths.'"

The Book of the Rotten Daughter is ripe – and wonder filled."
— Stephen Corey

"'Finally the body wants its worm,' Alice Friman tells us, taking on death, her parents' or her own – what befalls any one of us eventually – and the grief that can shatter. These are astonishing poems which fearlessly jump into hell and out again, that resent or forgive, poems which wryly, exactly and so richly honor the world of the living.

"And that world? Friman, however brilliant at metaphor and its brief transformation, is an absolute realist. We enter the poems and know the place. And we can't look away."
— Marianne Boruch

Search Poetry Daily / Amazon.com for other books: