Dr. Olivia Clare Friedman is the author of four books, most recently the poetry collection An Arm Fixed to a Wing from LSU Press. She is also the author of the novel Here Lies, the short story collection Disasters in the First World, and the poetry collection The 26-Hour Day. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Schedule

1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
Outside Museum, West Tent
The Louisiana Poet Laureate Presents Louisiana Poets, Volume 2
Dennis Formento, Phaeton’s Wheels
Olivia Clare Friedman, An Arm Fixed to a Wing: Poems
Skye Jackson, Libre
Benjamin Morris, The Singing River: Poems
Chuck Perkins, Beautiful and Ugly Too
with Gina Ferrara

2:15 pm to 3:00 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

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.