paper • 96 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-961897-34-2
eISBN: 978-1-961897-35-9
March 2025 • Poetry
Named a Library Journal 2025 “Title to Watch”
Like an itinerant evangelist, poet Gabriel Fried transforms every space he enters with a sacred kind of attention. If “the big-top makes a chapel of the fetid / lot between the ballpark and the river, / where the air sticks like a rancid jam,” Fried erects poetry in each humid landscape of our feverish lives. And the roaming world of childhood to which No Small Thing returns us is one where shapes and selves may shift in one blessed blink. Defter than nostalgia, slyer than sentiment, the voices of these poems cast just so many spells of indeterminacy. Behind their looking glass, Gabriel Fried guides us down the corridors where sociality and gender, religion and ethnicity, language and identity negotiate their forms. The richly saturated subjects of No Small Thing range from pastoral youth, ancestral tenements, and remembered ghettos to the revival tent, child preachers, and the word-encrusted performances of the grown but still enchanted poet. Fried’s work captures the earthy and illusory magic of poetry, as if performing a “negative-numbered, phantasmagoric” self-portraiture with only “a fogged-up looking glass.”
HIV Triolet
We were thin for different reasons.
I was fourteen. It was 1989,
and I wore shit-kickers with cut-off jeans
that wore thin. (For different reasons,
neither of us dressed right for the season.)
I sat in his Wrangler one seedy time.
We were thin for different reasons:
I was fourteen; it was 1989.
No Small Thing is a book filled with wry wit, and formal dexterity, and grit, as Gabriel Fried moves from the joys and losses of mid-life, to the underworld of childhood, and back again. “For the worms,” he writes, “I sing a sad new hymn,” and indeed, these poems make a beautiful, soulful song.
A preternatural intelligence infuses No Small Thing as Gabriel Fried climbs and descends childhood’s lattices of fear, wonderment, and becoming. These quietly profound, radiant poems crystalize those sensations with a playfulness and technical brilliance that feel like a kind of faith. They glimmer and refract into parenthood, an age with its own questions and awes. The sequence for Lucie Brock-Broido is jaw-dropping. A superb collection.
Gabriel Fried’s cheeky, mind-bending, fablelicious poems come across the horizon like the sweetest memories you never knew you had. There are all kinds of formal play in these myth-bound poems that remind us of all we have had and all we must hold on to. I love this book—both otherworldly and intimately familiar.
Gabriel Fried’s No Small Thing…offers a visceral recall of a queer boy’s transformation.