No Small Thing

Like an itinerant evangelist, poet Gabriel Fried transforms every space he enters with a sacred kind of attention. If “the big-top makes a chapel of the fetid / lot between the ballpark and the river, / where the air sticks like a rancid jam,” Fried erects poetry in each humid landscape of our feverish lives. And the roaming world of childhood to which No Small Thing returns us is one where shapes and selves may shift in one blessed blink. Defter than nostalgia, slyer than sentiment, the voices of these poems cast just so many spells of indeterminacy. Behind their looking glass, Gabriel Fried guides us down the corridors where sociality and gender, religion and ethnicity, language and identity negotiate their forms. The richly saturated subjects of No Small Thing range from pastoral youth, ancestral tenements, and remembered ghettos to the revival tent, child preachers, and the word-encrusted performances of the grown but still enchanted poet. Fried’s work captures the earthy and illusory magic of poetry, as if performing a “negative-numbered, phantasmagoric” self-portraiture with only “a fogged-up looking glass.”

Gabriel Fried is the author of three collections of poetry: No Small Thing, The Children Are Reading, and Making the New Lamb Take. He is the longtime poetry editor for Persea Books and Director of Creative Writing and Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri.