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FRIENDLY FIRE

FRIENDLY FIRE

$16.95Price

ISBN: 978-0-9800289-1-1

Pub Date: Spring 2008

Pages: 60


By Katrina Roberts


Friendly Fire—that accidental agent of injury or death to one's own forces—lends its name to Katrina Roberts' third collection, capturing the disquieting mix of innocence and violence central to the work's exploration. Elemental and protean, fire appears throughout these lyrical glimpses, always a syzygial force; that which terrifies (or destroys) may be that which is necessary. These poems consider how both nurture and nature inform violent behaviors; how we must choose to see beauty in decay; how prayer has power even if we don't know whom we're addressing. Informed by the possibilities of the "American" sonnet, this sequence confronts inherent dangers in even the best-intended human gestures, and explores how we sustain faith in the face of such damage. Searching for sense in an often shattered world, limning a seam between personal and political, mining contradictions we must live within when so many people are at war, when hunger, disease and poverty are rampant, these poems forge a place where intentions and consequences are called into question; where silence is indeed profound and must be honored with apology, forgiveness and praise; and where—when facing mortality—one might sing in celebration.


Friendly Fire, Katrina Roberts’ cycle of fifty-two sonnets, proves the durability and flexibility of the lyric today. A taut narrative scaffolding supports Roberts’ brief, searing meditations on family, farm labor, friendship, illness, parenting. Colloquial language lends verve. Literal images evoke the texture of farm life. Roberts explores abstraction (“Forgiveness”) with apt metaphor: “I shelter the grudge, build / a rustic cabin for it in my chest, pound rusty nails / in to anchor a porch where I sit glaring./ At the close of “Malignant,” the narrator asks a timeless question: “what lies in wait for us?” Read Friendly Fire for Roberts’ sensual and wise rendering of the here and now.”

—Robin Becker, author of Domain of Perfect Affection


This is a gorgeous, amazing book. I've been an admirer of Katrina Roberts' poems for years and these poems confirm my long-standing affection. Buy this book now.

—Sherman Alexie, winner of the National Book Award 2007


    Katrina Roberts' Friendly Fire is a fresh, elegant, and serious poetic triumph. These poems, while introspective, speak of the world, and the reader develops a deep connection with the sensibility and mystery behind them. Katrina Roberts is the kind of poet who knows how to nurture the energies of pleasure and grief, ecstasy and despair, and bring them fully formed to the page. She explores the hidden places, discovers them and invents them. What she asks of birds might be asked of her poems: ". . . Where did the birds find this filament? Such / active circling and weaving; the dervish love calls / into being . . ." These poems are convincing and ample testimony to the truths of time and mortality, and Katrina Roberts is a poet of remarkable gifts.

    —Laura Kasischke


    Katrina Roberts' new poems are wonderfully readable and engrossing, because they are so true to our conscious experience, making swift and credible transitions between perception, memory, reflection, worry, and well-being. Life is both sweet and anxious in these poems, which makes them the more real, and the pervading theme of fire has the ambiguity of Shakespeare's 'Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.'

    —Richard Wilbur


    Katrina Roberts' poems do not admit easy phrasings; instead, they are assembled word by word, each chosen with informed deliberation and a sense of pace. I have followed the track of her lines with heightened attention, eager for her next surprise.

    —Billy Collins


    Katrina Roberts has published four books of poems: Underdog, Friendly Fire, The Quick, and How Late Desire Looks. She is the Mina Schwabacher Professor in English and the Humanities at Whitman College, where she directs the Visiting Writers Reading Series. Her work appears in places such as The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets. She and her husband, Jeremy Barker, founded Tytonidae Cellars and the Walla Walla Distilling Company in southeast Washington State, where they live on a small farm with their three young children.

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