About Species:

"These texts poke holes in parole, speaking to you with the saleslady-like sincerity of a person handing you a sizeable styrofoam brick. You've gotta love the guest-host voice of these promptings, the lime-green, martini-in-a-bomb-shelter tone."

                                                - Tim Davis, The Poetry Project Newsletter

"Friedman has a great deal to say about myth, history and the dance of the protozoa, not to mention the invention of a new perfume, Michael Friedman's Night of Magic. Members of a royal family, king, queen, princess, join monsters, gods, beatniks and Jesus to live the kinds of lives we'd like for ourselves, if we could but escape this damned restrictive prison of self. This work is drenched in wit and brio, its narrative mysteriously tangled with anxiety and alterity. A natural melancholia attaches itself to the underside of the text, like Kate Winslet going back on the Titanic after Leo's made sure she's safe in the lifeboat."

                                               - Kevin Killian