Alive to the kinetic pleasure of the street, Daisy Fried writes of city life and lives in a way that elides poetic distance, turning the reader into a subject and bringing the landscape into intimacy and immediacy. At once socially conscious and indignant, she faithfully renders experience into exact lyrics that never substitute manipulation of language for acuity of vision.

Eleanor Wilner, last year’s Conkling poet at Smith, writes of Fried’s first book, She Didn’t Mean to Do It: “She’s got a one-of-a-kind, syncopated city-talking voice: book smart, street smart, sophisticated, and an ear so good it seems to pick up every human frequency, in poems off-beat and on-target (hold on to your heart).”

She Didn’t Mean to Do It was awarded the University of Pittsburgh’s Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for a first book of poetry and published in 2000; Pittsburgh will release her second collection in Spring 2006. Embracing risk and testing instability, Fried’s poems take as their subjects relationships, sex, work, and family. Says poet Albert Goldbarth, “Daisy Fried has managed to fashion. . . a life-enhancing vision . . . Her eye is brave, her language is omnivorous, her heart is bountifully chambered.”

Fried’s poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Threepenny Review, and New York Quarterly, among others. A graduate of Swarthmore College, Fried is a recipient of the prestigious Pew Fellowship in Poetry and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She makes her home in Philadelphia.