She Didn't Mean To Do It

By Daisy Fried

Winner of the 1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize The thirty-three narrative, linguistically-adventurous poems in She Didn't Mean To Do It range freely among styles and voices. Examining human emotions and behavior in all their contradictions, Daisy Fried turns a perceptive eye on those around her. Fried integrates metaphoric flights and idiosyncratic narrative, surprising us with the details--"I saw that the wisteria/in dusk its same color hung (heavier than/the breasts of stabbed and stabber ever would be)"--while her characters traipse across lines and pages. These are poems about human relationships, mostly romantic and sexual. They're also about jobs and work: urban, action-packed and socially aware.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822957388
• ISBN13: 9780822957386
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

seriously nervy and good

This is a book I wish I'd written. Since I didn't, I'll settle for reading it (three times so far). It's nervy, urban (but accessible to me, who grew up on the edge of cornfields), funny as hell, and has language sharp and bright as glass. There's no pretention here, and there's a real ground-level view of city life, personal life, and politics made personal. Alternately gorgeous, funny, politically subtle but profound. Also very solidly crafted.

Fried's macho poems enchant and vervify

With all due respect, are these other reviewers clouded by hormones, fashionably scornful, or just full of popsicles? Come ON! Daisy Fried is one of the most original voices to hit the planet. Who does she sound like? Nobody! She is the champ of anti-chick poems, writing unsentimentally about what girls care about; she is the original combo plate, truly funny and truly feeling at once. The sound of her work is rhythmic, musical; she's got the beat of real life underneath it all. She SEES and her writing shows it. The woman's got nerve and verve to spare. I could eat for these poems for days and find something new in them to love. I look forward to more from this fresh in every sense writer.

Generous, beautifully-written poetry

This is a wonderful debut--poems about city life of all kinds but especially as regards young women's experience. It's a politically aware book that doesn't just gaze at its own navel, and it's beautifully written. I can't disagree more with the previous reviewer, but here's the whole of the poem she quotes from. Decide for yourself.2000New Year?s Eve, it?s 6 p.m. Bar dooron the corner opens and closes, it?s just silver slipping and slamming but first a run of heat through the door, the shine in the black of spigots and mirrorsand bottles and desire without methodand two men on some stools, womanless, elbowsslid together, cardboard hats reading ?ew Yea?in glitter that rains down and the doorshuts. Puddles by the curb, a little jazzof rain. A girl down there showing her teethto a man, her voice all made of sirensand rocks and dirty butter and cheap stockings,preg again or out of dope or don?t hit meor don?t leave me or what will I door take me with you and silence. Where thewind goes when there is no wind. Whatyou will never be because you don?t know how to want to. If you cannot take me under cover of night, if you cannot savethe whole world, what will become of me?

Essential Gaudiness

Continual surprise is this book's best gift: line to line and page to page, you never know what Daisy Fried might say, or where her hungry imagination might veer next. Musically, the poems are jazzy and thickly textured free verse. Thematically, there's nothing unduly cautious here, no tiresome solemnity: here is "the essential gaudiness of poetry," in Wallace Stevens's words. Fried is eminently readable and frequently delightful in both thought and tune.

Fresh as a Daisy

This book is full of attitude, negative, positive, indifferent. There is a self-delighting energy, sometimes comic, sometimes trenchant, and a lot of eye-catching first lines: "I never was much good at blow jobs," "Oh she was sad oh she was sad." These and others clearly indicate the femininity of the poetry. It is a feminism that is full of erotic pleasure and (I suspect) unthreatening to men, who are bound to respond affirmatively to the sass (I know because I tried out a few of the poems on my boyfriend). An altogether impressive debut.