Benjamin Friedlander

A Knot Is Not a Tangle Benjamin Friedlander

Poetry. Did someone say 'The Runes of Western Civilization'? All the great heresies are here: poignant rhymes, literate feints and graceless parries, the bogus and the beautiful, elliptical, epochal and incidental, and even a poem--held to a refrigerator by a Goofy magnet--by Carla. The filibuster of philosophical flourishes edited by Kimberly Filbee's philiate (filial) appendex is not to be missed, as this punk spymaster sings the collective nose-ring off our wilting, unwitnessing unconscience.--Brian Kim Stefans

Diving into the viscera, Ben Friedlander arrives at a poetry fierce with pleasure and dis-ease. A KNOT IS NOT A TANGLE offers a splendid trip through the lurid truths of the world, tied together by a lyric entirely haunted, stark, and clear.--Lisa Jarnot

Ben has always and variously pusued that point at which his language lifts off from rational sense and allows us to glimpse something else, between the lines, projective. His lyric poems work that line that connects despair to comedy, that tenuous human line. Their mixture of technical human inventiveness and rueful or exuberant recklessness is compelling, going where language leads rather than where it's led, giving up control in order to change, to move, to get somewhere, to travel.--David Levi Strauss