She Didn't Mean to Do It

by Daisy Fried

Overview

Winner of the 1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize The thirty-three narrative, linguistically-adventurous poems in She Didn't Mean To Do It range freely among styles and voices. Examining human emotions and behavior in all their contradictions, Daisy Fried turns a perceptive eye on those around her. Fried integrates metaphoric flights and idiosyncratic narrative, surprising us with the details—"I saw that the wisteria/in dusk its same color hung (heavier than/the breasts of stabbed and stabber ever would be)"—while her characters traipse across lines and pages. These are poems about human relationships, mostly romantic and sexual. They're also about jobs and work: urban, action-packed and socially aware.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822990888
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	01/07/2001
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	627 KB

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.

Table of Contents

Contents I 2000 Carnival in Spring Then Comes the Girl with the Tampon in Her A Story Having to Do with Walt Whitman Whatever Works 57 May Women Near Our Lady of Ransom She Didn’t Mean to Do It Electric Slide II Little Girls Weaving Settled Correggio Slaughterhouse Island Fishtown Song Romance Novel Bulrush Bollocks by the Thames Ice Water Steam Moving Her Around The Kites Trooper Wit’s End III Azalea Garden The Means Duet for a Button Store: lyrics without music Only Envy One in the Hand Him Again Princess Counting Peas I. The Beauty of Boys on Skateboards II. River Clean Strike Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

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 writes poems about the unexpected, inexplicable forms desire takes, the sometimes wonderful and sometimes catastrophic consequences of our desire-driven actions...she writes what she hears, which is American English, circa now. The poems are alive and musical, inflected with the jazzy rhythms of the living language that is always being invented around us. "No diff, bride from bridesmaid this night," she writes. "Bodies spazzy with childhood" and "Clinton photo-opped on his big '98/China junket, only blobbier, grabassing around"...The energy of their performance carries you deeply into the lives they describe. And when you've put down the book after a few readings, it's the sure music of these people and places that stays with you, as in the careful repetitions in the short poem "Fishtown Song."--Eugene Weekly

Andrew Feld

Pulsing poems...there's a sadness...throughout the book that sleeps beneath the surface of even Fried's funny pieces. Rarely does she offer something easy that we can sink into. Fried gives us the ebb and flow and the pool of effects that ripple within life in the city. -- Pittsburgh Weekly

Sharmila Venkatasubban

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