Fried's vivacious sophomore effort is a breath of pure oxygen for the serious, politically engaged, unpretentious free-verse storytelling so popular in American poetry a generation ago and in eclipse since. Moving from her own bourgeois-bohemian domesticity to the tough kids of inner-city Philadelphia, Fried (She Didn't Mean to Do It
) revives the personal anecdote and the narrative incident through wit, a sterling ear and a prosaic patience. In the title poem, Fried's brother goes to jail for his involvement in left-wing street protests; elsewhere Fried (who teaches at Smith College but flaunts her Philly connections) describes a first boyfriend, the sorrows of minimum-wage work, her aging left-wing Jewish aunts and the three things that have ever made her husband cry. Fried's opening poem takes the form of a message left on an answering machine; "Jubilate South Philly: City 14" adopts Christopher Smart's famous quasi-biblical praise poetry to describe a sassy pregnant teen, while "The Hawk" finds the right symbol to protest the Patriot Act. Winningly personal, the poems are nevertheless artful, with a light touch to balance their heavy subjects of social and racial injustice, closer perhaps to Grace Paley than to Philip Levine. (Mar.)
