Early/Late: New and Selected Poems draws from Philip Fried’s previous four collections of poetry: Mutual Trespasses (1988), Quantum Genesis (1997), Big Men Speaking to Little Men (2006), and Cohort (2009).

The new poems are haunted by the current financial turmoil and possessed by the disembodied voices that multiply in our world of simulacra. As D. Nurkse wrote of Cohort, this work “opens exciting territory where poems haven’t dared to venture—the toxic side of the Information Age as it veers out of control.”

“Multi-layered but never opaque, these poems move gracefully from forest to subway, from a suburban drive-in to the Rodin museum, from post-war discovery to pre-war doubt. Fried’s is a Jamesian view of this country and other places, where history is a companion at almost every table, an observer in the schoolroom, in the next seat at the theatre, where wit is tinged with tragedy and vice versa.”
Marilyn Hacker

Philip Fried is a New York-based poet and the founding editor of The Manhattan Review. His poems have been widely published in journals and have appeared in many anthologies, including Salmon: A Journey in Poetry, Poems 1981–2007 and Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets.