An Arm Fixed to a Wing: Poems

Olivia Clare Friedman’s An Arm Fixed to a Wing seeks out the spiritual elements that haunt the everyday, the divine wing fastened to an earthly arm. Elegies and poems of nostalgia appear alongside pieces celebrating the speaker’s present moment, with the underlying knowledge that such moments slip past too easily. Several poems explore the theme of motherhood--the excitement and novelty, the routine and translucent sleeplessness. At the book’s center sits a sequence of narrative pieces, titled ＂Camera Poems,＂ exploring experiences of isolation, hopefulness, and self-awareness.

While the poems in An Arm Fixed to a Wing acknowledge that loss is a constant, their tone is frequently wistful, evoking the desire to recover feelings of attentiveness and wonder toward one’s surroundings, both the mundane and the extraordinary.

Olivia Clare Friedman is the author of a novel, Here Lies, a short story collection, Disasters in the First World, and a book of poems, The 26-Hour Day. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Paris Review, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She is director of the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.