Reconstruction by Edith Friedman

“Reconstruction, by Edith Friedman, maps the delicate reconstruction of a life and a self in the face of bodily precarity, harrowing genetic legacies, mother-daughter lineages, and multiple facets of loss. In a series of poems that are linguistically deft, formally inventive, and filled with images that pulse and ache with hunger, yearning, and sorrow, Reconstruction is a riveting, harrowing, and intensely beautiful collection.”

—Lee Ann Roripaugh judge 2024 LBP First Chapbook Award

author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50

"Edith Friedman’s Reconstruction shattered me. A linguistic rupture not without its mending threads, but a rupture nonetheless. This imagistic lyric spirals at the height of devotion in a “sea of writhing branches” between sisters, mothers, daughters and friends in the seemingly never-ending aftermath of cancer diagnoses. Capitalism’s apathy and dereliction toward women’s health underscores these lines; “I schedule the surgery. I get a week off work.” And yet, despite the cold machinations of public health, there springs a defiant tenderness. “This has nothing to do with love,” says the poet. “I know my body is the one you want / because I am inside it.”

—Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of Cenzontle