What they're saying about Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice:
"...commanding...biting...hilarious...." Matthew Brennan, New York Times
"'Torment' is one of the best American poems I've read in years...Is Women's Poetry a masterpiece? It surely locates Fried as one of the masterful poets of her generation." Jason Guriel, PN Review
"...dazzling...shows wit and range worthy of playwright Wendy Wasserstein." Carolyn Alessio, Booklist
"..."devastatingly on target and funny in a way that can make you blanch." Library Journal
"When Daisy Fried's Women's Poetry isn't making me laugh out loud it's making me cry...If Fried is pitch perfect as a parodist, her snappy, racy energized style has tender uses as well...No stench, here, of sentimentality or political correctness but we know where the poets afections lie...Fried can nail whatever she bumps into with nonstop precision, force, and humanity in the indecorous American language that is one of our culture's great gifts to literature. Women's Poetry is her third book, and she is at the top of her form." Alicia Ostriker, Women's Review of Books
"'Torment' is at once a grippingly intimate and anxious-making narrative poem."--Chris Hutchinson, chrishutchinsonblog.blogspot.com
"Fried observes and details the sad minutiae of American life and language better than almost anyone...even as she its us where she lives, she salves the wound with a generosity that is almost redemptive." Sarah Kennedy, West Branch
"...This book shows a wide-ranging mind, a valuable voice...thought-provoking and hilarious..." Philadelphia Inquirer
"Fried's connection to her generation extends beyond the problems of a society that does not seem to value education or cerebral muscle...In these poems, [she] displays an intense and refined attention to the troubles of the present moment. Effectively blending the personal with the more universal, she delves into issues surrounding womanhood, but also she looks at the troubles of humanhood."--Melinda Wilson, Coldfront
"I rarely come across a poem as sharply-angled as Fried's 'Torment'...challenging...dangerous..."--Daniel Bosch, The Critical Flame
“Fried is one of the most engaging contemporary poets writing today, for she is as thoughtful, witty or wise as the best conversationalists...In every one of these poems there is the trademark Fried voice, sure and recognizable as a close confidante who manages to provide you with a slice of life by the way she fractures the story-line and interlineates her reactions and impressions. . . . .For those who like readable, funny, intensely honest poetry, it doesn’t get much better than this.”--Steve Critelli, Against Interpretation
"The poetry of Daisy Fried practices for a for-real poetry vérité; Fried loves the rough, tumbling texture of vernacular impressionism, all the quirks and idiomatic pell-mell of spoken consciousness: 'Public art stinks always but a certain participation/ in the style of the day before yesterday cannot be denied/ Windy: Big trucks swinging their trailers/ almost into my lane....' Or: 'Sad Armageddon of Marriage: how pretty much nice/we meant to be.' Fried's poetic voice--long-striding, unpretentious, unsentimental--is anchored by a rock-solid, almost rude, recurrent honesty, intimate as a punch in the arm. The result of her vigorous, forward-rushing style, her passionate and tender social acumen, and her blunt, sensible clarity--is a poetry more convincingly in touch with the lived life than almost anyone else's. I go back to her books over and over." Tony Hoagland
"'I, too, dislike it.' Daisy Fried's witty take on 'Women's Poetry' isn't what you'd expect. This isn't the grapey communion wine of the sisterhood, but a galling, and galvanic, and gimlet-eyed appraisal of human behavior across a panoply of contexts—glimpsing the aging Kissinger in Paris; eavesdropping on job-seeking Princetonians on a commuter train; tracking the vogue, in Rome, for clamping padlocks on bridges to commemorate love affairs. To my ear, what Fried does with the American vernacular is matchless: She infuses it with the savage energy that William Carlos Williams was looking for a century ago when he wrote despairingly, 'We believe that life in America is compact of violence and the shock of immediacy. This is not so. Were it so, there would be a corresponding beauty of the spirit—to bear it witness...' Here is a woman who strides across a moonlit back lawn to feed feral kittens she has named Raphael, Gabriel and Lucifer. Such are the revamped angels in the house of women's poetry. To which I say Amen." Ange Mlinko
“'She was tired of sad modern endings. . . She narrated things calmly and swiftly,' Daisy Fried writes, as her steely narration, calm and swift, dismantles our expectations for poetries that address gender, class, motherhood, politics, and poetries. In “sourness a kind of joy,” she asserts, and throughout this stunning collection demonstrates this over and again, most strikingly in the beautiful braidings of “Attenti Agli Zingari.” These poems end as they begin: fiercely, frankly, getting the last word: ‘scomplicated.." Susan Wheeler
"Passionate, nervy (as in 'You've got a lot of...'), telegraphic, indecorous, chewy, sharply observed and smart, this is decidedly not Kathie Lee's America we're encountering in Daisy Fried's wonderful new collection, nor the life of a woman inside that corporately imagined Proctor&Gamble/ Maybelline realm. Off come the pink Happy Goggles and on come the lights. Be unsettled, it's quite all right. Women's Poetry is bold, joyfully energetic poetry, and MOST invigorating, even if you're a guy." August Kleinzahler
"Lyrical, idiosyncratic, electrically-gifted, no one writes quite like Daisy Fried, perhaps not even Daisy Fried. The poems come at you with flailing elbows, blurted youthspeak mashed-up with Italianate parlor musings, a unique conjury of angles, rhythms, and rhetorical postures, aswerve, aslant, aflutter, akimbo. This third book extends her range to the long sequence, the epistolary pseudo-poem, and heaven knows what else: don’t think too hard, buy it." Campbell McGrath
"...commanding...biting...hilarious...." Matthew Brennan, New York Times
"'Torment' is one of the best American poems I've read in years...Is Women's Poetry a masterpiece? It surely locates Fried as one of the masterful poets of her generation." Jason Guriel, PN Review
"...dazzling...shows wit and range worthy of playwright Wendy Wasserstein." Carolyn Alessio, Booklist
"..."devastatingly on target and funny in a way that can make you blanch." Library Journal
"When Daisy Fried's Women's Poetry isn't making me laugh out loud it's making me cry...If Fried is pitch perfect as a parodist, her snappy, racy energized style has tender uses as well...No stench, here, of sentimentality or political correctness but we know where the poets afections lie...Fried can nail whatever she bumps into with nonstop precision, force, and humanity in the indecorous American language that is one of our culture's great gifts to literature. Women's Poetry is her third book, and she is at the top of her form." Alicia Ostriker, Women's Review of Books
"'Torment' is at once a grippingly intimate and anxious-making narrative poem."--Chris Hutchinson, chrishutchinsonblog.blogspot.com
"Fried observes and details the sad minutiae of American life and language better than almost anyone...even as she its us where she lives, she salves the wound with a generosity that is almost redemptive." Sarah Kennedy, West Branch
"...This book shows a wide-ranging mind, a valuable voice...thought-provoking and hilarious..." Philadelphia Inquirer
"Fried's connection to her generation extends beyond the problems of a society that does not seem to value education or cerebral muscle...In these poems, [she] displays an intense and refined attention to the troubles of the present moment. Effectively blending the personal with the more universal, she delves into issues surrounding womanhood, but also she looks at the troubles of humanhood."--Melinda Wilson, Coldfront
"I rarely come across a poem as sharply-angled as Fried's 'Torment'...challenging...dangerous..."--Daniel Bosch, The Critical Flame
“Fried is one of the most engaging contemporary poets writing today, for she is as thoughtful, witty or wise as the best conversationalists...In every one of these poems there is the trademark Fried voice, sure and recognizable as a close confidante who manages to provide you with a slice of life by the way she fractures the story-line and interlineates her reactions and impressions. . . . .For those who like readable, funny, intensely honest poetry, it doesn’t get much better than this.”--Steve Critelli, Against Interpretation
"The poetry of Daisy Fried practices for a for-real poetry vérité; Fried loves the rough, tumbling texture of vernacular impressionism, all the quirks and idiomatic pell-mell of spoken consciousness: 'Public art stinks always but a certain participation/ in the style of the day before yesterday cannot be denied/ Windy: Big trucks swinging their trailers/ almost into my lane....' Or: 'Sad Armageddon of Marriage: how pretty much nice/we meant to be.' Fried's poetic voice--long-striding, unpretentious, unsentimental--is anchored by a rock-solid, almost rude, recurrent honesty, intimate as a punch in the arm. The result of her vigorous, forward-rushing style, her passionate and tender social acumen, and her blunt, sensible clarity--is a poetry more convincingly in touch with the lived life than almost anyone else's. I go back to her books over and over." Tony Hoagland
"'I, too, dislike it.' Daisy Fried's witty take on 'Women's Poetry' isn't what you'd expect. This isn't the grapey communion wine of the sisterhood, but a galling, and galvanic, and gimlet-eyed appraisal of human behavior across a panoply of contexts—glimpsing the aging Kissinger in Paris; eavesdropping on job-seeking Princetonians on a commuter train; tracking the vogue, in Rome, for clamping padlocks on bridges to commemorate love affairs. To my ear, what Fried does with the American vernacular is matchless: She infuses it with the savage energy that William Carlos Williams was looking for a century ago when he wrote despairingly, 'We believe that life in America is compact of violence and the shock of immediacy. This is not so. Were it so, there would be a corresponding beauty of the spirit—to bear it witness...' Here is a woman who strides across a moonlit back lawn to feed feral kittens she has named Raphael, Gabriel and Lucifer. Such are the revamped angels in the house of women's poetry. To which I say Amen." Ange Mlinko
“'She was tired of sad modern endings. . . She narrated things calmly and swiftly,' Daisy Fried writes, as her steely narration, calm and swift, dismantles our expectations for poetries that address gender, class, motherhood, politics, and poetries. In “sourness a kind of joy,” she asserts, and throughout this stunning collection demonstrates this over and again, most strikingly in the beautiful braidings of “Attenti Agli Zingari.” These poems end as they begin: fiercely, frankly, getting the last word: ‘scomplicated.." Susan Wheeler
"Passionate, nervy (as in 'You've got a lot of...'), telegraphic, indecorous, chewy, sharply observed and smart, this is decidedly not Kathie Lee's America we're encountering in Daisy Fried's wonderful new collection, nor the life of a woman inside that corporately imagined Proctor&Gamble/ Maybelline realm. Off come the pink Happy Goggles and on come the lights. Be unsettled, it's quite all right. Women's Poetry is bold, joyfully energetic poetry, and MOST invigorating, even if you're a guy." August Kleinzahler
"Lyrical, idiosyncratic, electrically-gifted, no one writes quite like Daisy Fried, perhaps not even Daisy Fried. The poems come at you with flailing elbows, blurted youthspeak mashed-up with Italianate parlor musings, a unique conjury of angles, rhythms, and rhetorical postures, aswerve, aslant, aflutter, akimbo. This third book extends her range to the long sequence, the epistolary pseudo-poem, and heaven knows what else: don’t think too hard, buy it." Campbell McGrath
My Brother is Getting Arrested Again
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist, James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets
One of Library Journal's 10 Best Poetry Books of 2006
*******************************************************************
“Daisy Fried’s poetry is fluid and quicksilver as life seen close up. Here is an original voice: provocative, poignant, and often very funny.”—Joyce Carol Oates
“The satirical tone here is delicious and the social observation is shrewd.”--
Sandra Gilbert, Poetry
“Fried is going to have one helluva career. She is precisely the kind of poet that dozens, if not hundreds, of other poets wish they were . . . Her second book is filled with poems startling in their vividness, their intelligence & their execution.”--Silliman’s Blog, February 7, 2006
“Fried’s vivacious sophomore effort is a breath of pure oxygen for the serious, politically engaged, unpretentious free-verse storytelling so popular in American poetry a generation ago and in eclipse since. Winningly personal, the poems are nevertheless artful, with a light touch to balance their heavy subjects of social and racial injustice.”--Publishers Weekly
“Lyrical, pertinent, compelling, Daisy Fried’s new book is firmly centered in urban American life, a center the poet uses to contemplate nothing less than the contemporary human condition. No poem is less than specific, creating its own narrative implying much beyond its margins, yet each is self-contained in elegant structure. This is a book about political awakening in the largest sense, where wit convinces in the place of dogma.” —Marilyn Hacker
“Fried’s poems are filled with life. When they come up with prose even half as spiky and direct and anything like as free of convention and cliche as Fried’s journalistic verse, I will be among the first to express my relief.”--Jordan Davis, The Constant Critic (online) Feburary 2006
“Daisy Fried does the gum-cracking teen who dominated your last train ride with her cell phone, she does the desolate young women who have tried on lives and found they won’t come off, she does the fortyish philosopher. She turns on her characters and on herself an objectivity at once brilliant and kind, shrewd and amused. Streetwise and unembarrassed and broken-hearted, her poems bring us a world so vivid and dense we would be glad for that gift alone: but then she lifts it for us, she makes it sing.”—James Richardson
”Daisy Fried is one not to miss on the poetry scene. Her second collection is evocative and fresh, its poems the kind to provoke and embarras the elders. . . . Displays a voice so original and precise that one wants to read what she’s reading and, of course, what she’s writing. Her art has room to fly in the face of what’s expected and acceptable.”—The Georgia Review
"...comfortably contemporary with none of the post-Beat hipster affectation one might associate with that description. Like Frank O’Hara and Harvey Pekar, Fried records the feints and fillips embedded in mundane activities—eating lunch, sulking, watching the news, complaining about spouses or lovers, working at ossifying jobs—that occur while we wait for more exciting things to happen. Her vivid characters could be émigrés from novels or short stories; they become present to us through physical gestures...[a] confident collection by a poet who crystallizes our American moment with candor and precision." Fred Muratori, Boston Review
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist, James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets
One of Library Journal's 10 Best Poetry Books of 2006
*******************************************************************
“Daisy Fried’s poetry is fluid and quicksilver as life seen close up. Here is an original voice: provocative, poignant, and often very funny.”—Joyce Carol Oates
“The satirical tone here is delicious and the social observation is shrewd.”--
Sandra Gilbert, Poetry
“Fried is going to have one helluva career. She is precisely the kind of poet that dozens, if not hundreds, of other poets wish they were . . . Her second book is filled with poems startling in their vividness, their intelligence & their execution.”--Silliman’s Blog, February 7, 2006
“Fried’s vivacious sophomore effort is a breath of pure oxygen for the serious, politically engaged, unpretentious free-verse storytelling so popular in American poetry a generation ago and in eclipse since. Winningly personal, the poems are nevertheless artful, with a light touch to balance their heavy subjects of social and racial injustice.”--Publishers Weekly
“Lyrical, pertinent, compelling, Daisy Fried’s new book is firmly centered in urban American life, a center the poet uses to contemplate nothing less than the contemporary human condition. No poem is less than specific, creating its own narrative implying much beyond its margins, yet each is self-contained in elegant structure. This is a book about political awakening in the largest sense, where wit convinces in the place of dogma.” —Marilyn Hacker
“Fried’s poems are filled with life. When they come up with prose even half as spiky and direct and anything like as free of convention and cliche as Fried’s journalistic verse, I will be among the first to express my relief.”--Jordan Davis, The Constant Critic (online) Feburary 2006
“Daisy Fried does the gum-cracking teen who dominated your last train ride with her cell phone, she does the desolate young women who have tried on lives and found they won’t come off, she does the fortyish philosopher. She turns on her characters and on herself an objectivity at once brilliant and kind, shrewd and amused. Streetwise and unembarrassed and broken-hearted, her poems bring us a world so vivid and dense we would be glad for that gift alone: but then she lifts it for us, she makes it sing.”—James Richardson
”Daisy Fried is one not to miss on the poetry scene. Her second collection is evocative and fresh, its poems the kind to provoke and embarras the elders. . . . Displays a voice so original and precise that one wants to read what she’s reading and, of course, what she’s writing. Her art has room to fly in the face of what’s expected and acceptable.”—The Georgia Review
"...comfortably contemporary with none of the post-Beat hipster affectation one might associate with that description. Like Frank O’Hara and Harvey Pekar, Fried records the feints and fillips embedded in mundane activities—eating lunch, sulking, watching the news, complaining about spouses or lovers, working at ossifying jobs—that occur while we wait for more exciting things to happen. Her vivid characters could be émigrés from novels or short stories; they become present to us through physical gestures...[a] confident collection by a poet who crystallizes our American moment with candor and precision." Fred Muratori, Boston Review
She Didn't Mean to Do It
Winner, Agnes Lynch Starrett Award
******************************************************************
“Daisy Fried's everyday toughness of subject matter makes her all the more aware of tenderness, hence her delight in ‘the beauty of boys on skateboards,’ with their clean necks, and her feeling for both stabbed and stabber in her poem about the carnival. Maybe this is the book of the year, it has such range and it is so well-written, for her faithfulness to her emotion is matched by her carefulness of execution.”—Thom Gunn
“Telegraphic nuggets. Frantic dispatches. Fried's poetry attacks and attacks, and gets through. And when it does, it does because she jams the right words into a strikingly original order with ferocity, intelligence and dash.”—August Kleinzahler
“The poems in Daisy Fried’s first collection of poetry, She Didn’t Mean to Do It, read like tough, urban fables. Formally innovative and thematically challenging, these poems traverse the geography of sex and teenage initiation rights . . . [T]hese poems resist being pinned down. They roam the pages in a kind of tight, disruptive free verse.”—Ploughshares
“Daisy Fried is a very talented, very serious, but also a very playful, young poet who deserves a wide audience. Her poems have two things—story and song—that are rare in poetry today, even among far more experienced poets. Though her voice doesn't sound like anyone else's, it has a subtle affinity with the jazzy, cool, humorous tones of writers like August Kleinzahler and Dean Young. Fried is a pleasure to read, but the pleasure is often mixed with something bitter, or salty, or hard, and that's what makes her so good.”—Wendy Lesser
“Of the urban landscape—its grit, power, ugly beauty, comedy and pain, Daisy Fried makes vital poetry. From a crew of girls shrieking and flirting out on the street the night before one of them marries, to skateboarders who are 'proud, unhumbled, as long as they shove and roll,' from scenes in bars to the layered story of a transit workers' strike, Fried knows her people, their nerves, their moves, their languages. She is right there. She celebrates and sings them.”—Alicia Ostriker
“Ranges widely in subject, demonstrating the virtuosic diversity of character and perspective more often encountered in an accomplished fiction writer’s short stories than in a first book of poems. Her best poems speak from a truly fresh voice, one which is simultaneously conversational and artful. . . . This is an unusual debut, and Fried is a poet to watch.”---Sandra Meek, Arts & Letters, Spring 2001
“Wise to the pity and humor of what goes on, Daisy Fried handles the most serious stuff with an easy dexterity, like a juggler working with hand grenades. She's got a one-of-a-kind, syncopated city-talking voice: book smart, street smart, sophisticated, and an ear so good it seems to pick up every human frequency, in poems off-beat and on target (hold on to your heart).”—Eleanor Wilner
“A brash, big-city, "ratatat" street-sly lyricism informs Daisy Fried's poems. Out of the fiery graffitispeak of Jersey and Philly girls swapping lore on their men and their menses; out of the heated battles of mother/daughter, male/female, and labor/management; out of all our missed opportunities and hard-won graces here at the dazzling, difficult start of our new millennium; out of a feisty operaesque duet in a button store, as well as out of the tough philosophy learned at piers, warehouses, and after-hours clubs, Daisy Fried has managed to fashion, finally, a life-enhancing vision that allows us to consider one another's "baby chick hearts/a little more tenderly." Her eye is brave, her language is omnivorous, her heart is bountifully chambered.”—Albert Goldbarth
“The poems successfully maintain a delicate balance, a unique and distinct interior logic.”—Philadelphia City Paper
“Fried’s poems bear abundant witness to the cruelties, the inanities, the subsudences that we live with, but ordinarily don’t stop to think about. . . . Fried’s vibrant delivery in these poems . . . infuses the appalling with poignancy, rges the reader out of numbness into vigorous response.”—Swarthmore College Bulletin
“The poems in Daisy Fried’s first collection of poetry, She Didn’t Mean to Do It, read like tough, urban fables. Formally innovative and thematically challenging, these poems traverse the geography of sex and teenage initiation rights . . . [T]hese poems resist being pinned down. They roam the pages in a kind of tight, disruptive free verse.”—Ploughshares, Winter 2000-1
“Read Daisy Fried’s inaugural book of poems, She Didn’t Mean to Do It and you’ll feel as if you’re in Philadelphia.”---Thomas Brady, Springfield News-Sun, December 24, 2000
“From pregnant teenagers dancing in a Bloomingdale’s basement bathroom to the recollections of a wry, middle-aged activist, Fried’s characters are the stuff of urban folktales.”---Sharmila Venkatasubban, In Pittsburgh, Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 2001
Winner, Agnes Lynch Starrett Award
******************************************************************
“Daisy Fried's everyday toughness of subject matter makes her all the more aware of tenderness, hence her delight in ‘the beauty of boys on skateboards,’ with their clean necks, and her feeling for both stabbed and stabber in her poem about the carnival. Maybe this is the book of the year, it has such range and it is so well-written, for her faithfulness to her emotion is matched by her carefulness of execution.”—Thom Gunn
“Telegraphic nuggets. Frantic dispatches. Fried's poetry attacks and attacks, and gets through. And when it does, it does because she jams the right words into a strikingly original order with ferocity, intelligence and dash.”—August Kleinzahler
“The poems in Daisy Fried’s first collection of poetry, She Didn’t Mean to Do It, read like tough, urban fables. Formally innovative and thematically challenging, these poems traverse the geography of sex and teenage initiation rights . . . [T]hese poems resist being pinned down. They roam the pages in a kind of tight, disruptive free verse.”—Ploughshares
“Daisy Fried is a very talented, very serious, but also a very playful, young poet who deserves a wide audience. Her poems have two things—story and song—that are rare in poetry today, even among far more experienced poets. Though her voice doesn't sound like anyone else's, it has a subtle affinity with the jazzy, cool, humorous tones of writers like August Kleinzahler and Dean Young. Fried is a pleasure to read, but the pleasure is often mixed with something bitter, or salty, or hard, and that's what makes her so good.”—Wendy Lesser
“Of the urban landscape—its grit, power, ugly beauty, comedy and pain, Daisy Fried makes vital poetry. From a crew of girls shrieking and flirting out on the street the night before one of them marries, to skateboarders who are 'proud, unhumbled, as long as they shove and roll,' from scenes in bars to the layered story of a transit workers' strike, Fried knows her people, their nerves, their moves, their languages. She is right there. She celebrates and sings them.”—Alicia Ostriker
“Ranges widely in subject, demonstrating the virtuosic diversity of character and perspective more often encountered in an accomplished fiction writer’s short stories than in a first book of poems. Her best poems speak from a truly fresh voice, one which is simultaneously conversational and artful. . . . This is an unusual debut, and Fried is a poet to watch.”---Sandra Meek, Arts & Letters, Spring 2001
“Wise to the pity and humor of what goes on, Daisy Fried handles the most serious stuff with an easy dexterity, like a juggler working with hand grenades. She's got a one-of-a-kind, syncopated city-talking voice: book smart, street smart, sophisticated, and an ear so good it seems to pick up every human frequency, in poems off-beat and on target (hold on to your heart).”—Eleanor Wilner
“A brash, big-city, "ratatat" street-sly lyricism informs Daisy Fried's poems. Out of the fiery graffitispeak of Jersey and Philly girls swapping lore on their men and their menses; out of the heated battles of mother/daughter, male/female, and labor/management; out of all our missed opportunities and hard-won graces here at the dazzling, difficult start of our new millennium; out of a feisty operaesque duet in a button store, as well as out of the tough philosophy learned at piers, warehouses, and after-hours clubs, Daisy Fried has managed to fashion, finally, a life-enhancing vision that allows us to consider one another's "baby chick hearts/a little more tenderly." Her eye is brave, her language is omnivorous, her heart is bountifully chambered.”—Albert Goldbarth
“The poems successfully maintain a delicate balance, a unique and distinct interior logic.”—Philadelphia City Paper
“Fried’s poems bear abundant witness to the cruelties, the inanities, the subsudences that we live with, but ordinarily don’t stop to think about. . . . Fried’s vibrant delivery in these poems . . . infuses the appalling with poignancy, rges the reader out of numbness into vigorous response.”—Swarthmore College Bulletin
“The poems in Daisy Fried’s first collection of poetry, She Didn’t Mean to Do It, read like tough, urban fables. Formally innovative and thematically challenging, these poems traverse the geography of sex and teenage initiation rights . . . [T]hese poems resist being pinned down. They roam the pages in a kind of tight, disruptive free verse.”—Ploughshares, Winter 2000-1
“Read Daisy Fried’s inaugural book of poems, She Didn’t Mean to Do It and you’ll feel as if you’re in Philadelphia.”---Thomas Brady, Springfield News-Sun, December 24, 2000
“From pregnant teenagers dancing in a Bloomingdale’s basement bathroom to the recollections of a wry, middle-aged activist, Fried’s characters are the stuff of urban folktales.”---Sharmila Venkatasubban, In Pittsburgh, Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 2001