On the Overnight Train
New and Selected Poems

Alice Friman (Author)

9780807181416

Paperback / softback, published 7 February 2024

210 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.272 kg

Alice Friman writes poems like no other. Whether rummaging the storehouse of memory, humanizing the celestial, or pondering from the 'high / hill of age' poetry's ageless subjects—life, love, and death—she refracts it all through the dual prisms of her inimitable wit and her pain-etched but supremely open heart. Prepare, reader, to laugh as she breaks yours." - Mark Drew

"Stricken, amused, this poet welcomes the dire, the ordinary, the strange, love from all angles into years and years. Under the autobiographical, it's the Greeks, the Bible, great paintings, great literature: backdrop and wild intervention in our motley human business. The playful beauty can't fool us. A dead-earnest curiosity's at work. Reverence. A poet telling us what we must know." - Marianne Boruch

On the Overnight Train collects a lifetime of thought and writing by Alice Friman, presenting poems of passion and permission, gravity and humor, alongside a great deal of truth telling peppered with the salt of invention. Here even the dead clink glasses and remain as alive and present as ever. Here the old stories abide and the new ones, written at the tail end of a life, face the inevitable with clear-eyed candor, wit, and grace.

As Stephen Corey writes in his introduction, "Friman's poetry is still kicking ass and breaking hearts as she steams toward ninety," and On the Overnight Train captures the world of a distinctive poet whose work is vivid, understandable, and emotionally honest.