In 33 narrative, linguistically-adventurous poems, this work ranges freely among styles and voices. Daisy Fried turns a perceptive eye on those around her to examine human emotions and behaviour in all their contradictions.

My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again celebrates the contradictions and quandaries of contemporary American life. These subversive, frequently self-mocking narrative poems are by turns funny and serious, book-smart and street-smart, lyrical and colloquial. Set in Philadelphia, Paris and New Jersey, the poems are at ease with sex happiness and sex trouble, girl-talk and grownup married life, genre parody and antiwar politics, family warfare and family love. Unsentimental but full of emotion, Daisy Fried's new collection, a finalist for the 2005 James Laughlin Prize, is unforgettable.

Daisy Fried's third book of poetry is a book of unsettling, unsettled Americans. Fried finds her Americans everywhere, watching Henry Kissinger leave the Louvre, trapped on a Tiber bridge by a crowd of neo-fascist thugs, yearning outside a car detailing garage for a car lit underneath by neon lavender, riding the train with Princeton seniors who have been rejected by recession-bound Wall Street, feeding stray cats drunk at midnight, bitching at her mother in the labor room, shopping with wide-bodied hunters for deer-dismembering band saws in the world's largest supplier of seasonal...