Overview

Olivia Clare Friedman's An Arm Fixed to a Wing seeks out the spiritual elements that haunt the everyday, the divine wing fastened to an earthly arm. Elegies and poems of nostalgia appear alongside pieces celebrating the speaker's present moment, with the underlying knowledge that such moments slip past too easily. Several poems explore the theme of motherhood—the excitement and novelty, the routine and translucent sleeplessness. At the book's center sits a sequence of narrative pieces, titled ""Camera Poems,"" exploring experiences of isolation, hopefulness, and self-awareness. While the poems in An Arm Fixed to a Wing acknowledge that loss is a constant, their tone is frequently wistful, evoking the desire to recover feelings of attentiveness and wonder toward one's surroundings, both the mundane and the extraordinary.

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9780807183731

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Reviews

""Reading Olivia Clare Friedman's An Arm Fixed to a Wing is like wading through a luscious dream. These poems seem to exist in that gauzy space between sleep and waking, where 'stars [look] liquid' and familiar rooms are filled with strangers—and where mystery reigns. Friedman's poems fold the ordinary realities of domestic life into the unknown of the self, of memory and creation."" - Marianne Chan ""Friedman plays uncanny music on the taut, frayed thread of human connection, 'hearing in each note the / opposite silence.' Birth and death sit beside each other in these exquisite rooms, breathing the same air, listening to the same song of ache: our desire to remember and be remembered, our need to see and be seen."" - Nick Lantz ""An Arm Fixed to a Wing delights in discombobulation, makes of us 'a hand struck through [a] thought.' It contains some of the darkness of Mark Strand, the distance of Emily Dickinson. These radically archetypal poems, were it not for their cameras, could live in any century, refusing anachronism. They are supremely individual, supremely social. What a rare pleasure to absorb these searching intuitions that become, for a dazzling moment, our own."" - Angela Ball

Author Information

Olivia Clare Friedman is the author of a novel, Here Lies, a short story collection, Disasters in the First World, and a book of poems, The 26-Hour Day. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Paris Review, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She is director of the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

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