Synopsis "What's Wrong (in English)"
To read the poems in Gregg Friedberg's WHAT'S WRONG is to discover a voiceunlike any other in its dizzying ability to address serious matters-love, desire, loss, belief and radical un-belief, to name a few-surprisingly, with joyous invention and indefatigable wit. The supreme ironist who isthe speaker of these poems consoles his tormented soul handily with verbalwizardry. Grief, he says, is "a mediocrity" so he dresses it up and makesa party of it all. His is a dark vision, to be sure, but in that darknessthere is no dearth of colorful illumination to pick up our spirits.-PegBoyers, executive editor of Salmagundi, author of The Album, To ForgetVenice, Honey with Tobacco, and Hard BreadRarely has formality of language achieved such intimacy-in these linkedpoems-the questing speaker, in reaching towards the other, begins toknow himself. "Can I infallibly distinguish the artificial from thenatural?" Indeed! Yet nothing surpasses the beauty of the language, itsmusic, its dance on the page, its lush sensuality.-Lee Gould, editor of La Presa
