Jeff Friedman

Jeff Friedman (born 1950) is an American poet and educator. He is known for his lyrical narrative verse rooted in autobiographical experience and for his later fabulist prose poetry and flash fiction which interweave the fantastical and the ordinary. In a review of Friedman's collection Floating Tales, poet and critic Walter Bargen wrote that the author "assembles fantastic tales only to disassemble them, then reassemble them into even more impossible worlds, and yet the reader will find her-or himself believing in their possibilities and often laughing along the way." Friedman is the author of nine collections of poetry and prose, which include Black Threads (2007), Working in Flour (2011), Pretenders (2014), The Marksman (2020), and the microfiction collection, The House of Grana Padano (2022), co-written with Meg Pokrass. He lives in West Lebanon, New Hampshire with his wife, painter Colleen Randall.

Early life and career Friedman was born in 1950 in Chicago, Illinois, the youngest of three children, and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. His father was a traveling salesman in the garment industry and his mother the owner of a dress shop in downtown St. Louis. His poems, mini-stories and translations have since appeared in American Poetry Review, Fiction International, Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Hotel Amerika, New England Review, North American Review, Plume, Poetry, Poetry International and The New Republic, among others, and in anthologies including Best Microfiction 2021, Best Microfiction 2022, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry (2019), and Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom (2023). His first book of poetry, The Record-Breaking Heat Wave, was published in 1986, followed by the collections Scattering the Ashes (1998) and Taking Down the Angel (2003). In addition to his six later books (including most recently The Marksman and Floating Tales), he has published two books of translations: Memorials by Polish poet Mieczysław Jastrun (with Dzvinia Orlowsky) and Two Gardens: Modern Hebrew Poems of the Bible (with Nati Zohar). Critics noted in these poems a strong sense of place and character, a "rueful lyricism," and a language and tone described as straightforward and accessible, compassionate, honest, unsentimental, and often penetrating. Reviewers distinguish this work by its comedic hyperbole and pacing, metamorphic quality, irony and social critique. Throughout both periods of his career, Friedman has written midrashic poems that reinterpret biblical stories in order to contextualize his personal and social themes in a larger world of myth and Judaic heritage. The latter two books mixed secular and religious impulses displaying both political consciousness and scorching humor (e.g., "The Golem in the Suburbs," "Night of the Rabbi"), as well as more difficult themes involving death, loss, family conflict and bitterness.

With Working in Flour (2011), Friedman took on a more surrealist mode that would continue into his later work, introducing vigorous, earthy imagery involving animals and flowers, food and appetites, as well as lovers and family figures. These stories often rendered the figurative literal, taking the results to logical, if surreal, conclusions that—no matter how strange—were believable due to the work's plain, rational language, keenly observed detail and physical grounding. Critic Celia Bland called the collection an "entertainingly believable" mix of hysterical concepts and farfetched actions with "the death-defying concision of a highwire act."

Recognition Friedman has won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for translation (with Dzvinia Orlowsky, 2016), fellowships from the New Hampshire State Arts Council (2003, 1993), a Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize (1998), and an editor's prize from The Missouri Review (1993). He has had residencies at MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and Yaddo.