My Destination - Daisy Fried

This dynamic collection of poems in "brasstacks, demotic American" (David Woo, The Poetry Foundation) gathers a chorus of voices, where the tangle of family and social life unfolds against a widow's grief.

"When I am reading a poem by Daisy Fried, I often forget that I am reading a poem, and believe myself instead to be experiencing an event. This may be a result of Fried's effortless command of those aspects of storytelling, like character and action, that we falsely reserve for novelists. But I prefer to think that My Destination succeeds for reasons of poetry—the poet's unapologetic curiosity about experience, and her remorseless hunger for the right words to know her moment. 'I begin to take an interest in life,' she writes at a moment few would dare (this is not the only audacious moment here, far from it). This book quite simply embeds itself in human life, and intriguing new ground is broken, in poems of widowhood, motherhood and more. Fried's conditions are epic, her voice is human, and her ability to describe the human comedy astonishing. With the tenacity of Athena and the craftiness of Penelope, she makes her way. I admire this book tremendously."—Katie Peterson