Daisy Fried '89
She Didn't Mean to Do It
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000
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Fried's poems bear abundant witness to the cruelties, the inanities, the subsidences that we live with, don't ordinarily stop to think about. Here, a house built on fill sinks into its foundations like "a tired man who has worked all his life / sinking to his couch, one hip, shoulder down with it, other hip, shoulder down with it." Here little girls in Turkey weave rugs morning to night: "In weaving, / the hands, which have a thousand angles--bird, mallet, poultice, purse, / signal, letter, clay wad, smoke--are merely pushed by the arms; / the arms are hung upon the back. Sense of balance is required. Little girls have that." Here, one 16-year-old girl stabs another to death: "Oh pity, oh pity guys. / Guys, I cannot breathe, I cannot see the night." Fried's vibrant delivery in these poems--the unexpected metaphor of exhaustion, the catalog of subtle gestures, the slang phrase raised to tragedy--infuses the appalling with poignancy, urges the reader out of numbness into vigorous response.
Daisy Fried has made her living as a journalist since graduating from Swarthmore, and that observational skill is everywhere evident in her accuracy of eye and ear--an accuracy that's unconventional, outrageous, striking. She's caught a film projector's "ticky whir," a sailboat's rig "tackata-tacking," a sprinkler's "switch, switch, swatch, switch," the rhythmic "kshoong, kshoong" of boys on skateboards, the way their hair "whaps, jets." She's caught the impact of elliptical speech: a girl on prom night thinking, "does he? / do I? does my?"; or spatting lovers declaiming, "You Always! You Never!"; or bachelorettes chiding the bride-to-be with, "Eeee, Tereese!" She's caught the shock of action reduced to essence: a flirting girl "showing her teeth to a man"; kids who "two-hand their pistols"; a drunk woman and a cop facing off "like two repelling / magnets"; transit executives who "swing their arms in for crashing corporate / handbone handshakes." Fried's tone whips from jocular--a businessman's "chinks and penetralia"; to creepy--"bad kids play nasty with a rat"; to startling--a maturing daughter "boiling off the mother"; to exquisite--"wisteria / in dusk its same color." Her accumulations--"hairy, staring, brackish"; "bird, mallet, poultice"--amplify a simple premise into stunning significance. These poems go everywhere, see everything, but they're always centered in that fine observing intelligence, even when the speaker is reduced to "my shadow over the face of a sleeping flatnose drunk," or to a revealing "I think" tucked into a complicated description, or to a single "our" taking possession and thus responsibility in a cityscape. She didn't mean to do it? Sure she did.
This book's not for everyone: Its brash sexual slang could sear off your eyebrows. But if you're in love with language, here's my advice: Buy the book, read it, ride it like a tiger.
--Nathalie Anderson
Professor of English Literature
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Christopher GoGwilt '83, The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture, From Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock, Stanford University Press, 2000. This book addresses geopolitics and the fate of the European hypothesis of culture.
James Glassman and Kevin Hassett '84, Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market, Random House, 1999. This book offers tips on investments and ways to maximize your portfolio. Hassett is also the sole author of Tax Policy and Investment, AEI Press, 1999. Part of the American Enterprise Institute's series on tax reform, it argues that tax changes can significantly stimulate investment.
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Roy Parvin '79, In the Snow Forest: Three Novellas, W.W. Norton, 2000. These stories are set in Montana, Wyoming, and the Trinity Alps of northern California during late fall, when blizzards threaten.
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Jon Van Til, Growing Civil Society: From Nonprofit Sector to Third Space, Indiana University Press, 2000. The author argues for a "third space," where individuals and organizations create the community and society they need.
Richard Wetzell '85, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880-1945, The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. For those interested in the attitudes toward deviant behavior, this work contributes to the study of criminology.
Éléonore Zimmermann '51, Poétiques de Baudelaire dans Les Fleurs du Mal: rythme, parfum, lueur, Lettres Modernes Minard, 1998. The author defines the development of Baudelaire's aesthetics in Les Fleurs du Mal and shows how he goes beyond the constraints of contemporary literary conventions.
In other media
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