Om What's Wrong
To read the poems in Gregg Friedberg's WHAT'S WRONG is to discover a voice
unlike any other in its dizzying ability to address serious matters-love,
desire, loss, belief and radical un-belief, to name a few-surprisingly,
with joyous invention and indefatigable wit. The supreme ironist who is
the speaker of these poems consoles his tormented soul handily with verbal
wizardry. Grief, he says, is "a mediocrity" so he dresses it up and makes
a party of it all. His is a dark vision, to be sure, but in that darkness
there is no dearth of colorful illumination to pick up our spirits.
-PegBoyers, executive editor of Salmagundi, author of The Album, To Forget
Venice, Honey with Tobacco, and Hard Bread
Rarely has formality of language achieved such intimacy-in these linked
poems-the questing speaker, in reaching towards the other, begins to
know himself. "Can I infallibly distinguish the artificial from the
natural?" Indeed! Yet nothing surpasses the beauty of the language, its
music, its dance on the page, its lush sensuality.
-Lee Gould, editor of La Presa
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