Alice Friman's newest collection brims with the spherical energy she invokes by the titles with which she chooses to divide her text: Libra, The Moon, Black Hole and Red Shift. Skilled at writing both long and short poems, here she maintains an amazing lyrical balance throughout each section while sometimes using intriguing forms which spring unselfconsciously from the content of the poems themselves. By turns sensual, surprising, arresting and often funny, these poems take us on journeys illuminated by myth, exacting memory, and the close observation of someone attuned to every small nuance of living.

From the starry sky over Greece, to plane travels, to the moon, to a shirt hanging on the door, Alice Friman covers it all. The language so rich, the imagery so sharp, the reader cannot help but to slide completely into each poem, making the poet's experience his or her own. I promise you will never look at seemingly simple objects in quite the same way! Reading "Inverted Fire" is like a trip to the art museum - after viewing each great piece, you must stand back and let it all soak in. A true pleasure. A must read!

In "Trasformations," one of the poems in her latest book, Zoo, Alice Friman writes "My resident spider/sways in the silk grocery of her wheel,/weaving another language than what I know...." Luckily for us, Friman's language is poetry, and what she observes of the human condition is worth listening to for its newness, its visceral surprises. It is a language textured rich and sassy, sometimes painfully poignant as in Mary's Boys and Wrapping Up the Lost, the middle sections of the book dealing with ancestry, the loss and love of family. Friman's Zoo also takes the reader from the landscapes of Indiana to the plains of Africa and the coastal waters of Hawaii in poems layered with history, the natural violence of the animal world, and all the metaphorical wonders therein of a skillful and, at times, wondrous poet. In my opinion, the women are outdoing the men these days in the realm of poetry, and Alice Friman is one of the great doers in a very prolific period of publishing.