My Brother is Getting Arrested Again. By Daisy Fried. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. $14.00 (pa.)

Fried creates compelling, specific situations to play out issues in contemporary life. There are surprising lines throughout (you should see the sticky notes in my copy). There's a kind of detached humor in these poems, with lines such as, "The college kids are all taking their hairdos/out for walks" from the poem "Neat Hair". But the standout poems are examples of Fried confronting this detachment head on.

In "Slack Morning, Reading Stern for the First Time at 36, after My Husband Has Mocked Me for Years for My Omissions, Princeton, Early Fall" Fried begins with a stripped down description of the narrator's husband's reminiscences of reading Tristram Shandy: "'I'm 15,' he says, 'determined/ to be socialist, to drag myself out of the Victorian swamp/that was Northeast Philly back then.". The narrator goes on to describe the horrors of the world which seem to just stream in, unbidden: "Another beheading on NPR, a musical interlude…" These images are striking, much more so than the husband's remembrances of the joy of discovering the book. Then: "The one dove I see outside the apartment window/ becomes two,/then nine or ten—/wittering among the yellow leafing flashbulb of a tulip tree." Fried's meaning is complex. Perhaps she is saying that it is difficult to focus on art, such as Tristram Shandy, when there is so much horror in the world. Yet there is beauty right outside the window.

But there's more to it than that. Fried says: "but the rightwing thinktanker who's actually been thinking a little admits/"once a whole population of a country doesn't want you,/you have to go..." The 'thinktanker' is clearly in charge; all the narrator can do is watch, no matter how convoluted the situation becomes, as all she can do with news of beheadings is listen. Similarly, in Sterne's novel, the reader is simply along for the ride while Shandy, himself, continually steps in the way and diverts that ride, which can be overwhelming to someone expecting a conventional novel. The cruelty of life, also, can be overwhelming to a sensitive person, and finally Fried's narrator turns away from talk of war and talk of Sterne's beautiful convolution to a simpler image of joie de vivre. There is value in appreciation of beauty, in connecting with life outside our own, as, in Sterne's novel, the reader learns to sit back and enjoy the ride. The question is, will Fried's narrator's be a momentary turning away? Fried only raises this question, but it's an important one to consider.

This poem strikes me because it taps in to a central theme felt by many young Americans. As citizens of the most powerful and wealthy country on the planet, we feel responsible for the wellbeing of just about everything. "We all love what others have done wrong to." Fried says in "American Brass". We are the products of a consumerist culture which has done wrong to a great many things, and we are beginning to take responsibility for the problems we, and our parents, have created. This guilt is a difficult burden not only because of the enormity and diversity of the problems we see (social, environmental, political, etc.) but because this feeling of responsibility walks hand in hand with nihilism. We feel ourselves to be entitled, after all, which means that just caring should be enough, right? We don't have to actually do anything, do we, or actually understand the issues?

The temptation is to give up, when faced with the realities of these situations and the corruption and greed that people bring to just about everything (including the fact that all of these ideas could very well appear in a commercial for designer jeans) though I don't think Fried is being nihilistic. She hints at change; the 'thinktanker' has "been thinking a little" after all. Fried's narrator is, presumably, reading the book she's ignored in the past.

In the titular poem, the narrator says: "My brother is getting arrested again./What does he want? What does he know?/We can't talk politics. He doesn't have politics./I'm helpless with him." The narrator describes her brother taking part in protests: "He pushes hard at a sawhorse barricade,/ black bandana up over his nose./He shouts This is what democracy looks like." But though he is involved with the protest, he isn't involved in other areas of life. She adds: "He's not lending a hand at needle exchanges./Not fishing from pier's end with his best buddy, Dad." Throughout the poem, she repeats the mantra that, because of her brother's apparent refusal to compromise, she (and her mother and sister etc) are "helpless with him." He is ignoring the lessons of the past—a life of protest must be grounded if it's going to last. Fried seems to echo the pivotal line from Salinger—"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."

-CL Bledsoe