Join us for an afternoon with Gabriel Fried, who will read from his new poetry collection, No Small Thing. A conversation with Lisa Russ Spaar will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Like an itinerant evangelist, poet Gabriel Fried transforms every space he enters with a sacred kind of attention. If “the big-top makes a chapel of the fetid / lot between the ballpark and the river, / where the air sticks like a rancid jam,” Fried erects poetry in each humid landscape of our feverish lives. And the roaming world of childhood to which No Small Thingreturns us is one where shapes and selves may shift in one blessed blink. Defter than nostalgia, slyer than sentiment, the voices of these poems cast just so many spells of indeterminacy. Behind their looking glass, Gabriel Fried guides us down the corridors where sociality and gender, religion and ethnicity, language and identity negotiate their forms. The richly saturated subjects of No Small Thing range from pastoral youth, ancestral tenements, and remembered ghettos to the revival tent, child preachers, and the word-encrusted performances of the grown but still enchanted poet. Fried’s work captures the earthy and illusory magic of poetry, as if performing a “negative-numbered, phantasmagoric” self-portraiture with only “a fogged-up looking glass.”
About the Author: Gabriel Fried is the author of three books of poetry: No Small Thing (Four Way Books, 2025), The Children Are Reading (Four Way Books, 2017), and Making the New Lamb Take (Sarabande Books, 2007). He is also the editor of an anthology, Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems. His poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including The American Poetry Review, American Literary Review, The American Scholar, Bennington Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Yale Review. He is the longtime poetry editor for Persea Books, and is associate professor of English and director of creative writing at the University of Missouri.
About the Moderator: Lisa Russ Spaar has published thirteen books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems and a novel, Paradise Close. Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Prize for Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and a Horace W. Goldsmith National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Professorship appointment. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is professor of English and creative writing at the University of Virginia, where she founded and directed the Area Program in Poetry Writing for twenty years.
No Small Thing will be released on March 15. To order the book, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.