She Didn't Mean To Do It

by Daisy Fried

Overview

"The poems successfully maintain a delicate balance, a unique and distinct interior logic." --Philadelphia City Paper "The poems in Daisy Fried's first collection of poetry read like tough, urban fables. Formally innovative and thematically challenging, these poems traverse the geography of sex and teenage initiation rights . . . These poems resist being pinned down. They roam the pages in a kind of tight, disruptive free verse." --Ploughshares "Fried shows that poetry can be lyrical, bombastic, garrulous even, and still transport her readers." --Pittsburgh Tribune-Review "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 "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 "Of the urban landscape-its grit, power, ugly beauty, comedy and pain, Daisy Fried makes vital poetry." --Alicia Suskin Ostriker Daisy Fried, recipient of a Pew Fellowship in poetry, has published widely in journals, including American Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Antioch Review, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, and Threepenny Review. She has written articles and book reviews for Glamour, Philadelphia Magazine, Newsday, and Philadelphia Inquirer, among others, and has taught creative writing at Haverford College and Rutgers University. She holds a B.A. in English from Swarthmore College and lives in South Philadelphia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822957386
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	11/22/2000
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Daisy Fried is the author of She Didn't Mean to Do It, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She has also received the Cohen Award for poetry from Ploughshares, a Pushcart Prize, and the Leeway Award for Excellence in poetry. Fried has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and a Pew Fellow in poetry. Currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College, she lives in Northampton, MA, and Philadelphia.

Editorial Reviews

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


“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 

From the Publisher