Author: Admin

    Floating Tales by Jeff Friedman ISBN 978-1-941196-46-5 $21.95, paper. Plume Editions, MadHat Press Asheville NC https://madhat-press.com/collections/plume-editions   Floating Tales by Jeff Friedman With an introduction by Daniel Lawless   Reviewed by William Doreski Although the tone and mood of the prose pieces in Jeff Friedman’s new book vary from the witty to the incongruous to the zany, his subject is a serious one: the hulking presence of the absurd in ordinary lives. In his semi-fictional world bees have souls, Adam becomes the snake, someone pulls a singing clown from a hat, and a horse watches TV with a child. Friedman’s work is resolutely contemporary, but rooted in twentieth-century surrealism and Dada, To place himself in a genre context he prefaces his book with a quotation from the remarkable Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms.  And all three blurbs on the back of this vivid little collection link Friedman to Russell Edson. But while he has certainly learned much from Kharms and Edson and others, Friedman has a distinctive voice that resembles no one’s, and his wit, compression, and sense of structure are often superior to those of his predecessors. “Chair” illustrates these strengths. It begins, “When the man rises from a chair, after reading the newspaper, his body is shaped like a chair.” This compact, rhythmic sentence lays out the entire prose poem to follow. After further distortions occur,...