How direct and fierce Stuart Friebert’s poems are. His collection Floating Heart draws from the reservoir of memory re-lived and re-suffered. Unsparing and searching, shining with lucidity, attentive to both the anguish of history and the intimacies of singular lives, these extraordinary poems are pinpoint precise. They let us know that some wounds do not close but remain open as proof of how fully alive we must be for the sake of what matters most. How clear-headed these poems are in their authority. They remind us of the dignity that inheres in telling the truth. -Lee Upton, Author of Undid in the Land of Undone and The Tao of Humiliation Stuart Friebert’s poems are not afraid to risk the prosaic; just when the reader may think they settle into narrative familiarity, they take sudden, unanticipated turns. Dreamlike shifts occur, and unconscious insights surface, often disruptively. Marked by bleak humor and imaginative audacity, the poems mirror our least understood and darkest possibilities in ways that surprise, delight, and perturb. The range of subjects and tones is remarkable, as is the willingness to let the subject shape the poem and take both poet and reader to unexpected places.-David Young, Author of Field of Light and Shadow: Selected and New Poems Part fable, more than a dash of grit, always sane and wryly out there, these poems astonish, refiguring world and its grief in exact startling ways. I admit it: I love this work, thinking how those ‘little xxxes’ at the end of letters really are ‘curiously still, ’ how ‘it-bits of blackness … learn to be lightning, ’ how childhood never stops, how we age and die and keep. Somewhere in this book, Voltaire is screaming. Then there’s Kafka on a train in Prague who ‘smiles. He doesn’t seem to give a damn.’ But haunted as he is, Friebert does and does, unto pleasure and rare surprise. -Marianne Boruch, Author of Cadaver, Speak