She Didn't Mean to Do It

by Daisy Fried

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822957386
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	11/22/2000
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Daisy Fried is the author of She Didn't Mean to Do It, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She has also received the Cohen Award for poetry from Ploughshares, a Pushcart Prize, and the Leeway Award for Excellence in poetry. Fried has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and a Pew Fellow in poetry. Currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College, she lives in Northampton, MA, and Philadelphia.

Editorial Reviews

The poems in Daisy Fried's first collection of poetry, She Didn't Mean to Do It, read like tough, urban fables. Formally innovative and thematically challenging, these poems traverse the geography of sex and teenage initiation rights . . . [T]hese poems resist being pinned down. They roam the pages in a kind of tight, disruptive free verse.

Ploughshares

Daisy Fried is a very talented, very serious, but also a very playful, young poet who deserves a wide audience. Her poems have two things—story and song—that are rare in poetry today, even among far more experienced poets. Though her voice doesn't sound like anyone else's, it has a subtle affinity with the jazzy, cool, humorous tones of writers like August Kleinzahler and Dean Young. Fried is a pleasure to read, but the pleasure is often mixed with something bitter, or salty, or hard, and that's what makes her so good.

Wendy Lesser

Telegraphic nuggets. Frantic dispatches. Fried's poetry attacks and attacks, and gets through. And when it does, it does because she jams the right words into a strikingly original order with ferocity, intelligence and dash.

August Kleinzahler

Wise to the pity and humor of what goes on, Daisy Fried handles the most serious stuff with an easy dexterity, like a juggler working with hand grenades. She's got a one-of-a-kind, syncopated city-talking voice: book smart, street smart, sophisticated, and an ear so good it seems to pick up every human frequency, in poems off-beat and on target (hold on to your heart).

Eleanor Wilner

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

Of the urban landscape—its grit, power, ugly beauty, comedy and pain, Daisy Fried makes vital poetry. From a crew of girls shrieking and flirting out on the street the night before one of them marries, to skateboarders who are 'proud, unhumbled, as long as they shove and roll,' from scenes in bars to the layered story of a transit workers' strike, Fried knows her people, their nerves, their moves, their languages. She is right there. She celebrates and sings them.

Alicia Ostriker

The poems successfully maintain a delicate balance, a unique and distinct interior logic.

Philadelphia City Paper

A brash, big-city, "ratatat" street-sly lyricism informs Daisy Fried's poems. Out of the fiery graffitispeak of Jersey and Philly girls swapping lore on their men and their menses; out of the heated battles of mother/daughter, male/female, and labor/management; out of all our missed opportunities and hard-won graces here at the dazzling, difficult start of our new millennium; out of a feisty operaesque duet in a button store, as well as out of the tough philosophy learned at piers, warehouses, and after-hours clubs, Daisy Fried has managed to fashion, finally, a life-enhancing vision that allows us to consider one another's "baby chick hearts/a little more tenderly." Her eye is brave, her language is omnivorous, her heart is bountifully chambered.

Albert Goldbarth

Read Daisy Fried's inaugural book of poems, She Didn't Mean to Do It and you'll feel as if you're in Philadelphia.

Springfield News-Sun

Fried's poems bear abundant witness to the cruelties, the inanities, the subsudences that we live with, but ordinarily don't stop to think about. . . . Fried's vibrant delivery in these poems . . . infuses the appalling with poignancy, rges the reader out of numbness into vigorous response.

Swarthmore College Bulletin

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


“Daisy Fried is a very talented, very serious, but also a very playful, young poet who deserves a wide audience. Her poems have two things—story and song—that are rare in poetry today, even among far more experienced poets. Though her voice doesn't sound like anyone else's, it has a subtle affinity with the jazzy, cool, humorous tones of writers like August Kleinzahler and Dean Young. Fried is a pleasure to read, but the pleasure is often mixed with something bitter, or salty, or hard, and that's what makes her so good.”
—Wendy Lesser 

From the Publisher

Daisy Fried writes poems about the unexpected, inexplicable forms desire takes, the sometimes wonderful and sometimes catastrophic consequences of our desire-driven actions...she writes what she hears, which is American English, circa now. The poems are alive and musical, inflected with the jazzy rhythms of the living language that is always being invented around us. "No diff, bride from bridesmaid this night," she writes. "Bodies spazzy with childhood" and "Clinton photo-opped on his big '98/China junket, only blobbier, grabassing around"...The energy of their performance carries you deeply into the lives they describe. And when you've put down the book after a few readings, it's the sure music of these people and places that stays with you, as in the careful repetitions in the short poem "Fishtown Song."--Eugene Weekly

Andrew Feld

Pulsing poems...there's a sadness...throughout the book that sleeps beneath the surface of even Fried's funny pieces. Rarely does she offer something easy that we can sink into. Fried gives us the ebb and flow and the pool of effects that ripple within life in the city. -- Pittsburgh Weekly

Sharmila Venkatasubban