“The way his work ‘folds’ sounds together isn’t at all comfortable. Instead it bristles against itself, badgers and cuts against itself—exposes itself—in a way that is completely unheroic and totally admirable.”—Chris Alexander“Is melancholy good? I think Ben Friedlander has the moodiest ear for it in the field, and wit to match. Where he takes this immodest gift is to a tangled interstice where idiom intersects with the body's fault lines. Uncannily the reader has almost had these thoughts. The attraction feels sideways, vertiginous.”—Lisa Robertson“The poems continually entice construal but present tonal and semantic conundrums that fatigue the decoding intelligence, pushing the reader close to unframed sound.... The recalcitrance of these poems is brilliant.”—Bob Perelman“A kind of twisting cascade composed of sayings you almost recognize, but now they've changed, turned into something else, and they will keep turning, thrillingly, as the world does. Can you keep up?”—Rae Armantrout“Benjamin Friedlander speaks with a survivor’s humor and ungainsayable clarity of what we had thought to forget.”—Robert Creeley