What's Wrong

To read the poems in Gregg Friedberg's WHAT'S WRONG is to discover a voice

unlike 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 is

the speaker of these poems consoles his tormented soul handily with verbal

wizardry. Grief, he says, is "a mediocrity" so he dresses it up and makes

a party of it all. His is a dark vision, to be sure, but in that darkness

there is no dearth of colorful illumination to pick up our spirits.

-PegBoyers, executive editor of Salmagundi, author of The Album, To Forget

Venice, Honey with Tobacco, and Hard Bread

Rarely has formality of language achieved such intimacy-in these linked

poems-the questing speaker, in reaching towards the other, begins to

know himself. "Can I infallibly distinguish the artificial from the

natural?" Indeed! Yet nothing surpasses the beauty of the language, its

music, its dance on the page, its lush sensuality.

-Lee Gould, editor of La Presa