Description
"There's a lot of fake anger out there, masking dangerous fear. Daisy Fried gives us the real thing: anger born of despair, love, desire, injustice, and loss. She's a grave robber, revivifying the corpse of Baudelaire to mess with him and help her to cope. His ghoulish presence accompanies her as she haunts Philadelphia, 'that old worker, ' recording riots, suffering, stench. This book has killer atmosphere, fragrances fine and foul. It growls with the cavernous hunger of our 'graveyard Nation' mid-pandemic. But the calm center of The Year the City Emptied is Fried's dying husband. Just try and read his last lucid words, swansong of a lost world, without choking up."--Jennifer Moxley
Product Details
| Publisher | Flood Editions |
| Publish Date | March 14, 2022 |
| Pages | 80 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781733273480 |
| Dimensions | 7.5 X 4.9 X 0.4 inches | 0.3 pounds |
About the Author
Daisy Fried is the author of THE YEAR THE CITY EMPTIED: AFTER BAUDELAIRE (Flood Editions, 2021), Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, and She Didn't Mean to Do It. She is a poetry critic, poetry editor for the journal Scoundrel Time, and a member of the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She lives in Philadelphia.
Reviews
"In Daisy Fried's The Year the City Emptied: After Baudelaire, the splenetic 1850s Paris of Les Fleurs du mal is translated or transmuted into the 'angry Philly' of the plague year 2020. Fried expresses the fear and isolation of the pandemic and the anguish of police killings and their aftermath, but most poignantly she writes about the personal ordeal of watching her husband's mind and body disintegrate in his last year, and of trying to care for him without adequate resources."--Roy White, The Los Angeles Review
"These fresh interpretations revel in Baudelaire's signature exaggerated and florid misery . . . Fried shows readers that Baudelaire's poems have provocative things to say about 2020, tailoring them for modern times with her own original flourishes."--Publishers Weekly
"Fried's voice is brass-tacks, demotic American, with an unsentimental erotic nostalgia--'We couldn't stop being naked'--and a deceptively insouciant outspokenness that both veils and exudes a deep-seated melancholy"--David Woo, The Poetry Foundation
"Daisy Fried's The Year the City Emptied presents her take on bringing the poems of Baudelaire into the contemporary North American tongue. At once boisterous and witty, there's also more than a fair bit of gloominess cast over the project, as Fried was writing during short breaks from caring for her husband, poet Jim Quinn . . . This is how a poet lives and works with language, both her own and foreign: thinking through its ebbs and flows, interacting in concurrent fashion with past and future ranges discovered across the scope of its possibilities in the present. And there are no rules, only markers for what needs be moved beyond: 'I'm sure--no, I hope--I got many things wrong about the French. I take that as an achievement.' When the poem has all that is required, accuracy takes a backseat. With The Year the City Emptied, Fried has given the poem Everything."--Patrick James Dunagan, Rain Taxi
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