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The children are reading / Gabriel Fried.

by Fried, Gabriel, 1974-

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Four Way Books, 2017.

Children -- Poetry.

American poetry -- 21st century.

9781935536949 (pbk.)

70 pages ; 23 cm.

"A Stahlecker series selection"--Back cover.

Gabriel Fried opens this collection with these lines: "Where have the children gone this time? / There they are, behind the house, / standing in a cautious arc / around the flowers we warned them about." The Children Are Reading inhabits childhood spaces, physical and imaginative, on either side of the emergence of adult awareness, desires, and anxieties - which isn't to say desires and anxieties don't exist on the childhood end of the spectrum. In many ways, those are more emphatic, less mitigated in the poems, unconstrained by the delusions and rationalizations of adulthood. The poems are at once bounding toward, admiring of, and anxious about those childhood spaces, sliding back and forth along the continuum of childhood/adulthood on which fears of imaginative spaces crystallize and fluctuate. It would be inaccurate to think of adulthood as the place where wisdom pools in these poems, though it's in adulthood that some of the fears are reconceived and articulated. Fried shows us that there are powers and wisdoms held in childhood that are lost in adulthood, even with its increased autonomy of one sort or another. Gabriel Fried is the author of Making the New Lamb Take (2007). He is also the editor of an anthology, Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems. He is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Missouri.

American poetry.

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