Seeking to Make the World Anew

Sam Friedman is a remarkable activist. His writing is reportage from the front lines of the war on drug users. Like a soft tissue infection, he gets under the skin of the oppressor and lends voice to the mute and invisible. -- Allan Clear, executive director, Harm Reduction Coalition
Friedman's poems recognize the communal necessities of our survival and confront political and social issues head-on, including two of our greatest and most difficult current themes: the often tragic and always impure struggles for socialist alternatives to increasingly destructive capitalism, and the potential demise of our species if the world fails to create such an alternative. But these poems, while making clear the primacy of communal politics to our lives, do not rise from abstract, ideological dogma. Their ideas are rooted in dire predicaments the vast majority of people daily face. These poems are rooted in sadness, outrage, tenderness, even dark comedy, that is, a genuine concern for human welfare. -- Dale Jacobson, University of North Dakota, and honorary poet laureate of North Dakota (2005)
Sam Friedman's poetry burns with dialectical fire, both as denunciation and as questioning of a false and alienating world. His introduction offers thoughtful reflections on Marxism, dialectics, and the anti-Stalinist left since the 1960s. -- Kevin Anderson, author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism; Marxist theorist, scholar, and activist
This book is full of work that is rooted to the world with compassion, love, anger, and sorrow. The poet's strong social conscience is evident in every page. By his commitment to social justice, he forces us to examine our own. -- Maria Mazziotti Gillan, founder and executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and Professor and Direc