In The Language of the Enemy, Stuart Friebert gives us something precious: a fictionalized, detailed view of the past that is wondrously free of sentimentality or nostalgia. Frieberts stories are simply told, but each of them has a bite. A young mans love of flying whisks him into a wartime disappearance; the big adventure of retrieving a mobsters body from a lake leads one rescuer to death from an infection; a revered German scholar breaks down as he recalls how he hurled into a bonfire books written by Jews. The Language of the Enemy illuminates-over and over-how cultural, natural, and...

"How direct and fierce Stuart Friebert's poems are. His collection Floating Heart draws from the reservoir of memory re-lived and re-suffered. Unsparing and searching, shining with lucidity, attentive to both the anguish of history and the intimacies of singular lives, these extraordinary poems are pinpoint precise. They let us know that some wounds do not close but remain open as proof of how fully alive we must be for the sake of what matters most. How clear-headed these poems are in their authority. They remind us of the dignity that inheres in telling the truth."-Lee Upton, Author of...