There are poets who publish early and conduct their education in public (like me) and there are poets who, young or not, are fully formed when they appear with their first books (like Whitman and Frost and Bishop). It’s impossible for me to imagine poems more fully integrated or more fully realized than those in this book and it’s heartening to me that these poems were written by someone young. That Gabriel Fried has the talent, skill, intelligence, and wisdom to have an exceptional future as a poet is unquestionable, but this first book of his already represents a mature accomplishment of the art.
—from the Foreword by Michael Ryan

Most new poets ride off in all directions which will in their later avatars become the Boulevards and High Streets of the old poet they are bound and determined to become. Gabriel Fried is a little different from most because his single and unifying thoroughfare is the Concourse of Concern. His poems are various parables of solicitude for other lives. In Making the New Lamb Take, even the rawest intuitions, the rarest vulnerabilities are protected by this poet’s caretaking spirit.
—Richard Howard

Department of English