All in the Friedman Family

Working In Flour

Jeff Friedman

(Carnegie Mellon, 2011)

Jeff Friedman has created a community of characters, some modern, some ancient, but all of them family. Each of them speaks distinctly, even the animals. What they tell us is that Friedman has a gift for both the quotidian and the surreal. In fact, this book reads like a collection of family stories, some that are trotted out at every family reunion, others which are never spoken of again.

Take, for example, Poem for Ross Gay. ("Do you remember the time Ross ate that book by Larry Levis?") Ross is a character, all right. He has a huge appetite, the kind found in growing teenagers everywhere and he's apparently over for lunch. But Ross is poetic family, so in addition to melon and hummus, the speaker offers him a volume of Larry Levis poems, which Ross promptly eats. Friedman leaves no doubt that he means physical ingestion, which makes for a fresh alternative to the mundane mental 'devouring' of books that poets must do. It's the first indication that this poem, already skirting the edges of reality, won't be contained. When Ross, apropos of nothing, throws a kettle bell through the speaker's roof and it explodes into gold nougat, it seems at once to be perfectly fantastic (as in fantasy) and perfectly believable. It's both a wonderful tribute to a fellow poet and a celebration of what can be achieved in the form.

But Friedman has dark characters, too. The Binding is spoken by Isaac. This family story (as a Jew, Friedman can claim Abraham and Isaac as ancestors) is the opposite side of the codified story from the Torah. In Friedman's version, Isaac is strangely self-possessed and doesn't seem to realize that the wind is God's presence. Instead, Isaac sees his father as "a sad procrastinator." Taken with the line, "for the worst to happen. My father" from the first stanza, this is a damning portrait of the first patriarch. It's at once surprising and believable: surprising because the Abraham of the Old Testament never shrinks from God's will nor does he have second thoughts about being tested so cruelly; believable because children and parents are continually misreading each other, rejecting what they perceive to be weakness.

In the middle of these two extremes are the rest of Friedman's characters, some arguing in a diner, some offering contradictory advice, some up on a political soapbox, but all of them related to you, somehow. By way of introduction, here is the title poem.