* Winner of the 2015 CSU Poetry Center First Book Competition, Selected by Eileen Myles *

“Leora Fridman’s My Fault plays with bordering tensions: submission and sacrifice, blame and guilt, the land we live on versus what we feel we actually own. Fridman’s deft language, often transparently frank, subtly intimates that which waits underneath what’s told. There’s a digesting and reclaiming of the faults of the self as well as those of the earth—not just our collective responsibilities for global warming or labor exploitation, but also the man-made fractures along which natural events occur. The sense of this is how things are (is it?) running through the collection reads intimate and weighty at once.”
—Virginia McLure, Coldfront

Praise for My Fault

“My Fault is brainy and organic, interrupting itself. In My Fault politics and intimacy are jousting for the planet. Through My Fault nature appears, wearing a beautiful stut­tering naked poem you know what they mean. Yes.”
—Eileen Myles

“When someone says ‘my fault’ it’s usually just after something not so awful has happened; it’s usually a little light-hearted, a little excusable. When Leora Fridman says ‘my fault’ it’s not so simple as it is most welcoming. This new book introduces the poet as someone who is willing to be someone, not to hide behind so-called points of view or other concoctions of literary fastidiousness. There’s an ‘I’ in this book and it’s an ‘I’ saying over and over again here I am, how are you? This ‘I’ says ‘We are only looking about// Who can say where the handle is/ to this an opening door// Who can hit my switch?’ Reading My Fault is like being with a new friend who has chosen to trust you with her thoughts about just about everything. It’s rare a poet that lets herself be so exposed, so open for inspection, so un­guarded.”
—Dara Wier

Leora Fridman is the author of the chapbooks Precious Coast (H_NGM_N Books), Obvious Metals (Pro­jective Industries), On the Architecture and Essential Nature (The New Megaphone), and the chapbook of translations, Eduardo Milán: Poems (Toad Press). She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is founding co-editor of Spoke Too Soon: A Journal of the Longer and forms one fourth of the collective The Bureau.

Selected Reviews

Colorado Review

Publishers Weekly

Small Press Book Review

Coldfront

More Information

“To The Recent Sea” in Drunken Boat

Selected Poems in Powder Keg Magazine

Leora Fridman on “Grown to Covet” in Poetry Society of America

Interview with Tell Tell Poetry

Leora Fridman Website