Wolf in the Suitcase by D. Dina Friedman

Dina Friedman voices her poems so casually, only careful readers will wholly appreciate her unruly imagination. Syntactically, a poem like “We Are Stuck in October” destabilizes us right off the bat: “the remnants of leaves/shellacked on the slippery stoop test our dogged/tenacity.”  By poem’s end, we’ve encountered a funeral, a Yankees game, athletes’ acts of conscience during the national anthem, and the ecological perils threatening “these slippery, tilted times.”  Each poem in this book takes us on a journey, many involving Friedman’s Jewish heritage, deeply but skeptically engaged.  “Munich” finds present-day remnants of a murderous history “where fires consumed my ancestors’ hair”; while “The Tenth Plague” gives up-to-the-minute idioms to an Egyptian firstborn harassed by “the Guy [who] hardened the Pharaoh’s heart.”  If Friedman’s default tone is disabused irony, she’s not adverse to praise, as in the stunning “Letter to God from Florida.”  From the itchy intimacy of extracting a child’s head lice to “the sobbing guitar” of the blues, this poet, in her lovely debut, gives thanks for all the world affords. Readers will thank her back.

–Steven Cramer, author of Clangings and Goodbye to the Orchard

The stuff of dreams and nightmares, D. Dina Friedman‘s poems invite us to let go our ordinary ways of seeing and remembering.  Memory here is a Wolf in the Suitcase, “. . . wolf in all I do not dare / to say, biting at the zippered close; / the suitcase does its blinded, // muzzled dance . . .”  Although her complex work is seasoned with dark familial memories of Jewish experience, it is also peppered with a dry, wry humor: “Perhaps, if you stroke your beard, it might whiten back / to the time of Moses.”  And “God loves us because she has no other choice.”  Finally, in “A Letter to God from Florida,” the wit and the complexity come together: “Seriously, // thank you for the concept of infinity; / and this nitty vacation sand, shifting hot // as I dig my elbows down, raise my sacred torso, / stand to face the foam.” Friedman celebrates the real world, and infuses it with spirit.

–Pat Schneider, founder, Amherst Writers & Artists, and author, six volumes of poems, Writing Alone and With Others and How the Light Gets In, both from Oxford University Press.