On the Overnight Train

“Alice Friman writes poems like no other. Whether rummaging the storehouse of memory, humanizing the celestial, or pondering from the ‘high / hill of age’ poetry’s ageless subjects—life, love, and death—she refracts it all through the dual prisms of her inimitable wit and her pain-etched but supremely open heart. Prepare, reader, to laugh as she breaks yours.” ~Mark Drew

“Stricken, amused, this poet welcomes the dire, the ordinary, the strange, love from all angles into years and years. Under the autobiographical, it’s the Greeks, the Bible, great paintings, great literature: backdrop and wild intervention in our motley human business. The playful beauty can’t fool us. A dead-earnest curiosity’s at work. Reverence. A poet telling us what we must know.” ~Marianne Boruch

“Spanning many years and multiple volumes, On the Overnight Train offers readers a master class in poetry from one of our best practitioners of the art. Friman’s previous books memorably probed her relationships with her dead parents; in her new poems, she shifts her gaze to consider her own mortality. In light of the cardiac arrest described in ‘A Walk in the Park,’ these new poems feel especially urgent and essential, but every page of the collection is a triumph.” ~Chelsea Rathburn