To Be and Not to Be

By Philip Fried

In to be and not to be, Philip Fried engages our chaotic times with compassion and humor, sharp wit and satiric flair. Untethered voices, espousing conspiracy theories and an array of other quack notions, swarm in cyberspace. Shakespeare's Polonius writes his own soliloquy while characters from Macbeth escape from the play to roam our streets and prowl our social media. Lockdowns flatten our world, causing us to lose one or more dimensions. War, personified, claims to be misunderstood, and a ballad modeled on a famous Fran ois Villon poem laments the Sixth Extinction.

'The stick figure soldier with stick submachine sun shooting
lethal lines across the plane of a page
frozen in a never-ending battle will never
remember he was drawn by the hand of a child ..."
(from "At the Dimensional Border,"
the final section of to be and not to be

"This poem is a particularly fine example of Fried's ability to render large events on a small scale and reveal their significance in the granular detail..."
--Carol Rumens
The Guardian, Poem of the Week, 28 October, 2024

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1915022797
• ISBN13: 9781915022790
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Salmon Poetry
• Length: 78 Pages