In other other news, I started reading Daisy Fried's My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again. Fried was a highlight of my magazine year -- snappy prose and warm bristly verse as alive with complications as Mike Leigh's movies. Her poems are mainly attempts to provide a complete and actual emotional experience. They have recognizable settings -- a bedside visit, a department party -- and a consistently inconsistent speaker keeping things going from poem to poem.

She seems to care not at all about poetry's usual rubrics and categories for evaluation, that is, she doesn't sound like she's trying to conform to some teacher or predecessor's ideas.