Friendly Fire

Katrina Roberts is the author of Underdog, The Quick, and How Late Desire Looks. She is the Mina Schwabacher Professor in English and the Humanities and the Paul Garrett Fellow in the Humanities at Whitman College.

Friendly Fire, Katrina Roberts' cycle of fifty-two sonnets, proves the durability and flexibility of the lyric today. A taut narrative scaffolding supports Roberts' brief, searing meditations on family, farm labor, friendship, illness, parenting. Colloquial language lends verve. Literal images evoke the texture of farm life. Roberts explores abstraction ( Forgiveness ) with apt metaphor: "I shelter the grudge, build / a rustic cabin for it in my chest, pound rusty nails / in to anchor a porch where I sit glaring." At the close of "Malignant," the narrator asks a timeless question: what lies in wait for us? Read Friendly Fire for Roberts' sensual and wise rendering of the here and now." - Robin Becker, author of Domain of Perfect Affection