She Didn’t Mean to Do It

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
Winner, 1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

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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.

80 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

November, 2000

isbn : 9780822957386

about the author

Daisy Fried

Daisy Fried is the author of My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She has received Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and the Cohen Award from Ploughshares. Fried reviews poetry books for the New York Times, Poetry, and the Threepenny Review and was awarded Poetry magazine’s Editor’s Prize. She has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and in Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA program. Fried lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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Daisy Fried