Making the New Lamb Take, Gabriel Fried
Every so often, even in a twenty-first-century America drenched in irony, a poet comes along who gives us back the world as it is. In his debut volume, Making the New Lamb Take, Gabriel Fried seems to step aside, allowing us to weave through the details of daily life, dream-life and the afterlife—the Ferris wheel of a seasonal carnival, the streets in snow, the infant deaths, the dog guarding the front porch. In the process, we find ourselves unexpectedly amidst Biblical and mythological stories so intimately retold that they seem populated by friends and relatives . . . the distance between myth and the everyday, collapsed. We remember Eliot’s dictum that only a poet with personality in the first place is able to repress it. And we welcome this poet, who gives us—instead of yet another hip, new, media-ready version of the self—the world we live.