The Book of the Rotten Daughter (review)

Alice Friman’s latest work offers an impeccably crafted example of the best of contemporary poetry in its fiercest guise. There’s not an extra syllable in the collection. Strong emotion is captured in taut lines, unaffected diction, textured sounds. Speaking of her mother, Friman observes: “All her life / she was ammunition / in a girdle” (“Osteoporosis”). This is Friman’s way of phrasing Keats’s “Beauty is truth / truth beauty” —her unorthodox way of talking about poetry’s capacity to shape anger, to wrap the truths of art in images that are witty, domestic, and intimate.

It’s no accident that the poet’s mother becomes “paper”—the place where poetry lives: “What secret / thinned to a fault line in the bone / betrays her now? / Crumple of paper lost in a bed.” This is a more humble version of Yeats’s “hammered gold,” expressed from a woman’s perspective, with empathy, dignity, and sorrow. Through “thinning” away of excess, through the alchemy of poetry, Friman’s aging mother is translated into art.

Some of the poetry makes the reader laugh out loud, as in “The Talent Show,” which reports on a nursing home event; the reader cheers the riotous slapstick until she is grabbed by the undertow of sadness: “And everyone unwrapped their own wooden spoon / except Armine Bonner, 116B, / who’d not let go of her dolly for anything.”

In the lyrical tercets of “The Fall,” Friman charts her mother’s fall in a sustained metaphor:

The carpet tilted like the sea. And she who never walked on water tipped, spun, then toppled— a bundle of sticks. Pinocchio’s old mother come apart in her strings.

The imagery grows wilder as the emotion deepens:

The way I watched you’d think it was Channel 8, another trick at the Olympics— another triple lutz gone wrong . . .

Friman’s work often embodies the aesthetics of the grotesque; if anything, she favors truth more than harmony. Her dry wit lets her approach mortality with a kind of detachment that enables the reader to enjoy the poems while taking stock of mortal troubles. “Dressing the Skeleton” avoids sentimentality about the poet’s mother by taking the clinical view:

If your specimen isn’t the medical school variety— suspended from a hook or neck-locked in a standing position—you’ll find placing it seated in a padded chair works best.

The “it” here depersonalizes the subject, turns mother into object; the readers, like medical students, may seem to observe dispassionately in an effort to grasp the toll of aging and illness. In the last stanza, the poet turns “it” into “mine”:

With mine, I like to finish with a touch of moisturizing lipstick before I brush out the hair, still lush and growing as if it didn’t know the mind had blown its case and it was time to stop.

Friman reports clearly on physical demise and the ravages of aging, but against the odds she offers consolation—not immortality or religion, but love, and the repair work of music and image. In “Final Instructions,” Friman articulates her own burial rites: “When I die I want to be buried / with sweet potatoes candied or / sauteed with apples & cinnamon . . .” The poem is built in a column with no punctuation, no pauses, and no final conclusion at the end. The poet’s yearning for reconnection with her mother has staying power and resonance, quieter than Ginsberg’s Howl, but no less fierce.

The poems in this collection cover many topics but center on the poet’s aging mother and on the death of her difficult father. Yet the love poems and poems about nature are resonant, and the poem in memory of Denise Levertov is a treasure, with line after line of discovery and elation: “all her poems come swooping down / in one last fall and gift . . ” Words are “humming together in a sleeve of air.”

Alice Friman’s poetry sets a standard in its uncompromising look at aging and mortality, its rhythmical insistence and tightness—its...