Description
Review
". . . I find much to recommend in Quantum Genesis. Its language crackles with energy, its lines are lean and hard, and its tone is often wryly humorous, making serious subject matter more accessible and more palatable. There isn't a weak poem in the collection." -- Robert Collins, Birmingham Poetry Review, Fall-Winter, 1997, No. 17
"In the lyric today, the syntax defines the structure of the singer's imagination, just as it did for the seventeenth-century lyricists. Here's an example from Philip Fried's elegantly intellectual Quantum Genesis . . . Philip Fried is a meticulous craftsman of the passionate." -- Marion K. Stocking, Beloit Poetry Journal, Spring 1998, Volume 48, No. 3
"Ultimately, and most impressively, what rings most resonantly throughout this book is this very ambition, which far exceeds so much of other contemporary verse . . ." -- Alan Michael Parker, Chelsea, Fall, 1997, Issue 63
Product Description
Philip Fried's first collection of poetry, Mutual Trespasses (Ion), recounted the fantasies, adventures, and mishaps of a character named God. In Quantum Genesis, he completes the God series and writes about a variety of other outsiders.
About the Author
Philip Fried is a New York-based poet, editor, and poetry advocate. His two books of poetry are Mutual Trespasses (Ion, 1988; now distributed by Zohar) and Quantum Genesis (Zohar, 1997). Poetry Flash praised Mutual Trespasses as "shamelessly, marvellously rhetorical." And A.R. Ammons called Quantum Genesis "a major new testament." In 1980, Mr. Fried founded The Manhattan Review, an international poetry journal that he continues to edit. This little magazine was "highly recommended" by the Library Journal. Mr. Fried also edited poetry for a book of photographs and poems titled Acquainted with the Night (Rizzoli, 1997). As a poetry advocate, Mr. Fried campaigned to increase the number of poetry reviews in newspapers.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Catechism
Does God exist?
Yes, in a crease,
a crevice, a small room among boulders,
a crack in a wall or a crack in a teacup.
He is here everywhere in our ruin,
pleached and implicated, entangled.
How is He manifest?
As a piecemeal
pyramid of crumbs carried
by squads of soldier-ants, the noble
helots, centurions, GI joes,
each crumb of the sublimest sweetness
and together an imminent monument
to creaturely delight.
And where shall we worship?
In the park of darkness
where lamps are set at intervals,
by a riverside at twilight, the boundary
time, the time of illusion, of transit,
of stumbling and love, as the mind's finger-
tips play over the body's zither,
or anywhere that is impure,
that is in and out, like breathing, half-
caste, mystical and gross as breath.
". . . I find much to recommend in Quantum Genesis. Its language crackles with energy, its lines are lean and hard, and its tone is often wryly humorous, making serious subject matter more accessible and more palatable. There isn't a weak poem in the collection." -- Robert Collins, Birmingham Poetry Review, Fall-Winter, 1997, No. 17
"In the lyric today, the syntax defines the structure of the singer's imagination, just as it did for the seventeenth-century lyricists. Here's an example from Philip Fried's elegantly intellectual Quantum Genesis . . . Philip Fried is a meticulous craftsman of the passionate." -- Marion K. Stocking, Beloit Poetry Journal, Spring 1998, Volume 48, No. 3
"Ultimately, and most impressively, what rings most resonantly throughout this book is this very ambition, which far exceeds so much of other contemporary verse . . ." -- Alan Michael Parker, Chelsea, Fall, 1997, Issue 63
Product Description
Philip Fried's first collection of poetry, Mutual Trespasses (Ion), recounted the fantasies, adventures, and mishaps of a character named God. In Quantum Genesis, he completes the God series and writes about a variety of other outsiders.
About the Author
Philip Fried is a New York-based poet, editor, and poetry advocate. His two books of poetry are Mutual Trespasses (Ion, 1988; now distributed by Zohar) and Quantum Genesis (Zohar, 1997). Poetry Flash praised Mutual Trespasses as "shamelessly, marvellously rhetorical." And A.R. Ammons called Quantum Genesis "a major new testament." In 1980, Mr. Fried founded The Manhattan Review, an international poetry journal that he continues to edit. This little magazine was "highly recommended" by the Library Journal. Mr. Fried also edited poetry for a book of photographs and poems titled Acquainted with the Night (Rizzoli, 1997). As a poetry advocate, Mr. Fried campaigned to increase the number of poetry reviews in newspapers.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Catechism
Does God exist?
Yes, in a crease,
a crevice, a small room among boulders,
a crack in a wall or a crack in a teacup.
He is here everywhere in our ruin,
pleached and implicated, entangled.
How is He manifest?
As a piecemeal
pyramid of crumbs carried
by squads of soldier-ants, the noble
helots, centurions, GI joes,
each crumb of the sublimest sweetness
and together an imminent monument
to creaturely delight.
And where shall we worship?
In the park of darkness
where lamps are set at intervals,
by a riverside at twilight, the boundary
time, the time of illusion, of transit,
of stumbling and love, as the mind's finger-
tips play over the body's zither,
or anywhere that is impure,
that is in and out, like breathing, half-
caste, mystical and gross as breath.
