"I slip into a buoyant medium / that keeps returning me / to the air I try to leave." In Joel Friederich's chapbook, Without Us, the poet slips over and over into the medium of water. It's the "deepest part" that his swimmers dive for, whether they're boys "daring each other / to dive and find bottom" or a young mother who feels in the "dim world" of a lake for "the lost…part of herself." They're all struggling, in his words, "toward what / neither you nor I can say." Like poet Elizabeth Bishop, Friederich is "a believer in total immersion, " and I, in reading his beautiful chapbook, have become a true believer in his work.
~Allison Funk
Winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize,
author of The Knot Garden,
and Editor, Sou’wester
