Outlasting the Weather: Selected & New Poems 1994-2020

Poetry. Spanning a quarter century of Friesen's work, the poems in OUTLASTING THE WEATHER speak to what is meant by a life lived in poetry. The poems in this selected are inseparable from the poet. To read them is to enter his thinking and ride his breath: to experience the art of making in as immediate a way as is humanly possible. This collection rejects wisdom; rather it is infused with the kind of knowing that comes from having weathered many seasons yet still remaining open to wonder. Memory, its fallibility, and its insistence on uncovering not one truth, but many, is a thread that runs throughout this book. Sometimes it is unclear whose memories we are reading: those of the poet or our own. These poems are archaeological digs through layers of a life lived without the certainty of belief.