The Book of the Rotten Daughter: poems [Paperback]

Alice Friman'sThe Book of the Rotten Daughtercontains astonishing poems which fearlessly jump into hell and out again, that resent or forgive, writes poet Marianne Boruch, poems which wryly, exactly and so richly honor the world of the living. Friman draws on her experience as caregiver for her aging mother and father, exploring such topics as nursing homes, osteoporosis, guilt, grief, the enduring power of familial relationships and the transcendent power of art. The book isn't about death but about the living's reaction to it, Friman says. The 'Rotten Daughter' has at least pulled something out of the fire. She has created something.

'Finally the body wants its worm,' Alice Friman tells us, taking on death, her parents or her ownwhat befalls any of us eventuallyand 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 cant look away.
Marianne Boruch

Alice Frimans 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 ('et 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.) Frimans poems are so tough that their tenderness breaks heartshers and ours. She can speak of being Sixty-five with no end before the end / in sight. Boiled down tlc9