Jeff Friedman

Jeff Friedman's Broken Signals is a wildly imaginative collection of dazzling fabulist micro tales that reveals a world of inexplicable mysteries in which we struggle to love each other and ourselves. A girl coughs out salmon fillets for the family dinner; a man can't remember his father's face; a man's lover believes he's Paul Newman...a female mime pantomimes sex with her lover, but never touches him; a flotilla of clouds sails toward the horizon, each with a dog tail ticking behind it. A husband opens the doors through which his wife sleepwalks and a white owl sews together the dreams of two lovers...Broken Signals is deeply serious and knock-out funny

You've lost everything, my enemy said. No, I answered, I still have you, Jeff Friedman writes in his inspired new collection of prose poems and micros, Ashes in Paradise. His fabulist inventions, biblical retellings, lyrical improvisations, and contemporary mini tales brilliantly depict the deep sorrows and absurd tragedies of these dark times. In Ashes in Paradise, a monster who looks like everyone else says to a monster hunter, "If you believe in monsters, perhaps you are a monster." The cops shoot a boy so many timesthathevanishes, and "Alltheycanseearetheholes."Amarriedcouplepurchases a tube of orgasms from Amazon only to watch the orgasms turn into bubbles popping above them. And a woman gives birth to herself and tells her husband she needs "a break and some new clothes." Surreal and darkly humorous, the prose poems and stories in this collection glow with the intensity of heaven-and hell.Jeff Friedman shows us the flexibility, stamina, and hilarity of the prose poem in his latest book Ashes in Paradise. Fabulist renditions of the political horror and unease of our times (the pandemic, police violence, political unrest) are set against wry, revisionist Biblical tales and neo-surreal domestic dramas (discounted orgasms delivered by Amazon Prime).... he brilliantly deflects our world's terror back onto the world and we, as readers, see ourselves and laugh an uneasy laugh. -Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story and Queen for a Day: New and Selected Poems ... In these short (but in no way slight) poetic surrealist tales we encounter: puppets that go hunting, an underwater beggar, a man who eats a piece of a star, a couple who order orgasms on Amazon, a chair that growls ... With an absurdist's wise irony Friedman makes good sense of what undergirds our very real precepts of what guides us, what trips us up, and what along with us, has its grip on the wheel. -Robert Scotellaro, author of God in a Can and Bad Motel Ashes in Paradise revolves around themes of otherness, hope and loss: with recurring holes, monsters, masks, lovers, avocados, animals and dreams, a father and mother, sister and brother. Stars and angels, vampires, spots, chairs, a coyote. A lover giving birth to herself. Jeff Friedman's prose is magical yet real, worldly and otherworldly. This book is a planet of its own. Wonderful, original, and lovely. -Kim Chinquee, author of Oh Baby and Wetsuit

In The House of Grana Padano, each shimmering micro story hovers between standup comedy and the unfolding of tragedy, between the mask and the mirror: A salesman tries on a suit and gets lost inside it; an ex-wife moves into a house made of Grana Padano cheese while her former husband nibbles the corners; and a father folds his daughter so tightly into his chest that her childhood disappears. Two modern masters of the fabulist micro, Pokrass and Friedman stretch language like magicians who are deep into their most amazing acts, creating elusive personas who can mime love, hate, anger or sorrow. The characters in these stories are searching for a moment to grasp, a future in all the dissolution around them, a family to love or curse. This improvisational collaboration between two critically acclaimed authors takes microfiction into a playful surreal universe that is wildly humorous and deeply truthful.

Jeff Friedman's eighth collection of poetry, The Marksman, blends surrealism, dark comedy, fable, hyperbole, history, and reinvented myth to explore the question of what it means to survive and live in our troubled times. This is a book of migrations and transformations, of wrenching displacement and redemption. Through its imaginative reach, wild humor, and dazzling clarity of language, The Marksman centers its aim on the broken dreams of our lives, and the tough love that will redeem us.

Pretenders interweaves narrative, lyric, and fable in poems that tell their magical stories with revelatory rhythms and precise diction. Surreal and darkly funny, these powerful poems create a dense world full of pretense, menace, deception, and double truths--in which we are all struggling to love each other enough to survive another day.