Like an itinerant evangelist, poet Gabriel Fried transforms every space he enters with a sacred kind of attention. If “the big-top makes a chapel of the fetid / lot between the ballpark and the river, / where the air sticks like a rancid jam,” Fried erects poetry in each humid landscape of our feverish lives. And the roaming world of childhood to which No Small Thing returns us is one where shapes and selves may shift in one blessed blink. Defter than nostalgia, slyer than sentiment, the voices of these poems cast just so many spells of indeterminacy. Behind their looking glass, Gabriel Fried guides us down the corridors where sociality and gender, religion and ethnicity, language and identity negotiate their forms. The richly saturated subjects of No Small Thing range from pastoral youth, ancestral tenements, and remembered ghettos to the revival tent, child preachers, and the word-encrusted performances of the grown but still enchanted poet. Fried’s work captures the earthy and illusory magic of poetry, as if performing a “negative-numbered, phantasmagoric” self-portraiture with only “a fogged-up looking glass.”
Gabriel Fried is the author of three books of poetry: No Small Thing (Four Way Books, 2025), The Children Are Reading (Four Way Books, 2017), and Making the New Lamb Take (Sarabande Books, 2007). He is also the editor of an anthology, Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems. His poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including the American Poetry Review, American Literary Review, American Scholar, Bennington Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Tin House, and Yale Review. He is the longtime poetry editor for Persea Books, and is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Missouri.
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