This book served as my introduction to Friman when she was on the Georgia Poetry circa around 2002-2003. Her lyricism and freshness and her devotion to craft hit me; later, she became a fixture at the MFA I went too because her husband taught in the English department, although I never studied under her. When traveling, I threw this book in my backpack and re-read in the last month for the first time in several years, and the wildness of the book hit me much more than when I heard her read from it more than a decade ago. 
 The way animal expands and contracts under Friman's poetic eye, glimpses of Tanzania and Kenya paired with the her family in the New York. This was far more moving to me now. Instead of a confessional mode, Friman writes in a contrast and incorporative mode: she is not declaring so much as taking in, deconstructing, and making her own experience a little more alien. Friman gives one permission to see a brutality in the world and then see it reflected back in one's own life: a permission she expertly hones and seeming surprising accessible at first, then only to become alien again.