Some Cares - by Benjamin Friedlander (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Benjamin Friedlander's first book in twelve years, Some Cares, is also his most autobiographical. Moving deftly from crude fact to abstract condition, the poems document a difficult decade of eldercare and mourning, of aging, unease, and fragmented knowledge. Of light and dark in alternation, seasonal rhythm, currents of feeling

The five stages of history Isolation Barter

Amnesia

Denial Anger Depression

Everything gets to happen

at least once, hypothetically;

the eventual will occur.

It all comes down

like snow, but doesn't stick My heart

is a cup that never fills.

I sip from it on occasion.

Review Quotes

Of previous work:

"The way his work 'folds' sounds together isn't at all comfortable. Instead it bristles against itself, badgers and cuts against itself-exposes itself-in a way that is completely unheroic and totally admirable."-Chris Alexander

"Is melancholy good? I think Ben Friedlander has the moodiest ear for it in the field, and wit to match. Where he takes this immodest gift is to a tangled interstice where idiom intersects with the body's fault lines. Uncannily the reader has almost had these thoughts. The attraction feels sideways, vertiginous."-Lisa Robertson

"The poems continually entice construal but present tonal and semantic conundrums that fatigue the decoding intelligence, pushing the reader close to unframed sound.... The recalcitrance of these poems is brilliant."-Bob Perelman

"A kind of twisting cascade composed of sayings you almost recognize, but now they've changed, turned into something else, and they will keep turning, thrillingly, as the world does. Can you keep up?"-Rae Armantrout

"Benjamin Friedlander speaks with a survivor's humor and ungainsayable clarity of what we had thought to forget."-Robert Creeley