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Mr. Friedlander’s Simulcast is not at all a nice book. It is, however, an intelligent, wickedly funny, and above all, strikingly original book. The central problem it grapples with—“the public is desirous only of poets, not poetry” (Poe)—is one most critics and poets have refused to touch. What should writing do about this unfortunate situation? Pretend it is not true? Hope it goes away? Rather than deny, moralize, or simply ignore our sordid fascination with “the most readily idealized public personae,” or maintain that this social phenomenon could not possibly have any bearing on the hallowed clearing of Literature-In-Itself, Mr. Friedlander dives headlong into the muck, much like Mr. Poe, Mr. Dryden, and Ms. McCarthy before him, in order to diagnose its various symptoms. What makes Mr. Friedlander’s contribution different is his counterintuitive use of a formal question—one that goes straight to the heart of the Author as Problem—to disclose and interpret the sociological one. Throughout Simulcast, the two halves of this false divide are continually brought into conversation: How does the fact that the avant-garde is a social formation (one generated by ListServes, reading series, publications, talks) bear on its aesthetic strategies? More interestingly, how can the avant-garde’s textual practices (primarily those of theft, collage, and palimpsestic writing) illuminate its status as a social formation? Simulcast is an unprecedented demonstration that aesthetic innovation itself can be used to produce something that has been badly needed for some time: a poetic sociology of the contemporary avant-garde.
—Sianne Ngai
Did someone say "The Runes of Western Civilization"? All the great heresies are here: poignant rhymes, literate feints and graceless parries, the bogus and the beautiful, elliptical, epochal and incidental, and even a poem—held to a refrigerator by a Goofy magnet--by Carla. The filibuster of philosophical flourishes edited by Kimberly Filbee's philiate (filial) appendex is not to be missed, as this punk spymaster sings the collective nose-ring off our wilting, unwitnessing unconscience.
—Brian Kim Stefans
Diving into the viscera, Ben Friedlander arrives at a poetry fierce with pleasure and dis-ease. A Knot Is Not a Tangle offers a splendid trip through the lurid truths of the world, tied together by a lyric entirely haunted, stark, and clear.
—Lisa Jarnot
Ben has always and variously pursued that point at which his language lifts off from rational sense and allows us to glimpse something else, between the lines, projective. His lyric poems work that line that connects despair to comedy, that tenuous human line. Their mixture of technical human inventiveness and rueful or exuberant recklessness is compelling, going where language leads rather than where it's led, giving up control in order to change, to move, to get somewhere, to travel.
—David Levi Strauss
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http://bostonreview.net/BR25.6/winter.html
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