Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
To Be and Not to Be

To Be and Not to Be

Fried, Philip

Paperback

Poetry AnthologiesPoetry Criticism

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1915022797
ISBN13: 9781915022790
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Published: Oct 15 2026
Pages: 78
Weight: 0.26
Height: 0.31 Width: 5.81 Depth: 8.81
Language: English
Chaotic modern life is met with compassion and humor, as conspiracy voices and literary ghosts swarm cyberspace.

In to be and not to be, Philip Fried engages our chaotic times with compassion and humor, sharp wit and satiric flair. Untethered voices, espousing conspiracy theories and an array of other quack notions, swarm in cyberspace. Shakespeare's Polonius writes his own soliloquy while characters from Macbeth escape from the play to roam our streets and prowl our social media. Lockdowns flatten our world, causing us to lose one or more dimensions. War, personified, claims to be misunderstood, and a ballad modeled on a famous François Villon poem laments the Sixth Extinction.

'The stick figure soldier with stick submachine sun shooting
lethal lines across the plane of a page
frozen in a never-ending battle will never
remember he was drawn by the hand of a child ...
(from At the Dimensional Border,
the final section of to be and not to be

This poem is a particularly fine example of Fried's ability to render large events on a small scale and reveal their significance in the granular detail...
--Carol Rumens
The Guardian, Poem of the Week, 28 October, 2024

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