ALICE FRIMAN

"These poems are evidence that, book by book, she’s becoming stronger in spirit, smarter, more resourceful in coping with pain and difficulty, more passionate about trees and creatures, sharper in her insights and observations, and generally more capable of calling up poetry’s alchemical powers to convert despair into song and discouragement into a battle cry.

. . . [S]he ends up making a making a gift to us readers out here on the other side of the page. But as we read, we’re aware of her disinterest in us and our wanting and needing the poem to give us something useful. Which mades her all the more trustworthy."

–David Huddle in The Hollins Critic

"Alice Friman’s “Vinculum” embraces the internal, the deep inside, the emotional interior as it interacts with our biological makeup. A “vinculum,” the horizontal line that appears between two numbers that are being divided, or to indicate repeating digits in a decimal, can also be translated as a “bond” or “tie” between two ideas. Friman’s attempt at creating a connective tissue between her poems is so successful that often individual poems fold back into themselves, each moment relating and recreating another.
 
“Vinculum” seems to work with three major concepts: the body, the location, the emotional moment or instance. In almost all of the poems there is an interaction between these that gives the reader a strong, multidimensional experience. From her poem, “The Waiting Room,” she writes:
 
  Imagine the humiliations of the flesh
  fumbling to cover up in that waiting room
  of white trees, those totems of eyes. Imagine
  your mother, her sparse patch. The unopened
  pink purse that is your daughter. Then now,
  with the wind up and the whipping grasses
  wild at your knees, before the dogs come,
  hurry write the choke of terror.
 
This examination of how the body can interact with a given landscape seems, at times, to be both complicated and chaotic. Friman’s language is dense, or, the poems themselves require a certain level of unpacking. “Vinculum” is sectioned into six parts (the last part is a postlude). The sections were incredibly helpful, as they allow the reader to move through the collection without getting too overwhelmed by the thickness of each piece, adding a quick breath in which one could recover and therefore, re-immerse.
 
Friman’s relentless, beautiful analysis of our in-betweenness, our connectedness, the “ropes that seethed from me to you and back again,” ultimately gives the reader a direct way to identify with the speaker. “Vinculum” does not shy away from personal interactions, and it openly, fearlessly, but often gracefully, crosses our boundaries."

- Kelly Forsythe in NewCityLit.com

"[T]he poet, who begins each section (and several other poems) . . . in the November woods, announces herself autumnal as well—but what an energetic, witty older age she divulges. From these bare branches she branches out, contemplative, touching all areas of a life fully lived.

The speaker of these poems is wonderfully versatile. At times she addresses someone directly, forcing the poem to bridge the gap of time, and even death; at other times she sheds this privacy in favor of including the reader: “look at him,” she says, or “who said that?” Her questions can’t help but involve us: “Pitted against desire, what’s so hot about / counting to ten?”

At times, the “you” seems oddly intimate, as though she were speaking to you over coffee. At other times, she holds you at some remove, asking nearly rhetorical questions or else speaking in directives: “Think salmon—”; “Listen—”; “Let us speak of the ant.” The reader is both in and outside of the text; the effect is itself umbilical, writer and reader treated almost as a single entity.

Again and again, the poet returns to what connects her to a former self and to a deeper mythological memory. Who are the gods and goddesses but ourselves writ large? . . . [T]he ancient stories serve less as metaphor, more as a kind of contemporary confirmation. Inviting her child self to participate, the poet reconsiders her life from the vantage point of her seventy years. And nothing suffers. She reanimates emotion—not remembered, but relived ….

She has remembered and honored the dead by being intensely alive. She has deftly combined serious frivolity with fervent solemnity. Indeed, she has translated what has been into what could be."
 
–Judith Kitchen in The Georgia Review