If Kevin Connolly presents himself as a tough Guy Noir, Daisy Fried seems destined to pick up on her own name, impersonating a fresh-as-a-daisy, wryly comic ingenue. My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again is her second collection, succeeding She Didn't Mean to Do It, which earned her a number of prizes. A sort of (wo)manifesto, her insouciant "Shooting Kinesha" begins with breezy ease—"'I hate what I come from,' says my cousin Shoshana,/22, jawing per always, feather earrings tangling/in her light brown hair"—then proceeds through apparently gabby family history to right-on portraits of three young women at a wedding, one a sulky druggy unwed mother, one a sulky bridesmaid, and one the sulky literary speaker whose father declares that her poems are "too full/of disgusting sex" and wants her to "write more like Derek Walcott," though she's "sick/of him throwing serious deepthinking/genius men up at me." The satirical tone here is delicious and the social observation is shrewd.

An even more bravura deliciousness marks my favorite single poem out of all of these books, "Jubilate South Philly: City 14," which borrows from Christopher Smart to study the ways of a wayward girl who seems at first like any other fourteen-year-old:

For I will consider how to be 14.
For will you please not act like you know me?
For quit talking to me like I'm a kid.

until we learn a pitiful truth:

For I would never get an abortion, Ma won't let me.
For Ma will take care of it & it will be fun to dress up.
..................................................................
For it is hot out & where do I go, pregnant, on a summer day?

Fried's deftly colloquial surfaces are deceptively charming, often sweetening the bitter with comedy but never denying bitterness. Her new book's title poem—along with several other overtly political pieces, notably "Empty Woman," about a march protesting the murders of women in Juarez—straightforwardly celebrates activism:

Is he driving a waverunner in circles and laughing
on the filthy Delaware...?
...............................

Is he climbing Mt. Rainier?
Nope. Come rain, or shine or sweat or hope
my brother is getting arrested again.

Kind of flat-footed, but, with its ironic weariness, preferable to what Fried elsewhere calls "ostentatious deepthink." Preferable, too, to the one or two places where her tone goes awry, getting too cutely self-conscious.

Fried's final offering, "Death, a poem in two parts," suffers from such cuteness as it depicts the author and her husband on a winter walk pondering "the problem of/putting dead animals in poems." "Too obvious,/invisible, symbolic," says the author—just before confronting a dead deer in a Philadelphia butcher shop. Afterward, at home, as she complains "your hands are too cold. But/I'll hold them in my armpits till they're warm," snow "swirls across the window,/invisible, symbolic, obvious." I guess avoid the obvious is the lesson here, especially if you know in your shivering body that it's also invisible and symbolic. But most of the time, fortunately, Fried's avoidance of the obvious is provocative—and subtle.

— Sandra M. Gilbert