to be and not to be, BY PHILIP FRIED
Review by Hilary Sideris
Philip Fried’s to be and not to be (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2026)is a meditation on collapse—both of the body and of the world around it. By way of the soliloquy, Fried guides us across the treacherous current earthscape with brilliant wordplay and irony, appropriating language from high and low places—most notably Shakespeare, but also the words of some of the current liars and thugs in charge of our country. This new book, Fried’s ninth, is colored by the poet’s experience as a Parkinson’s patient or, in his words, a Parkinsonian, who grapples with the question of what makes us human—how we are different from bots—and how our humanity is diminished as the body rebels and falters.
The theme of the body’s rebellion appears in “Fractured Soliloquy with Voice-under,” where the poet compares his situation to that of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, whom the Plebians accuse of leading them “by the belly.” Leadership by the belly happens when a leader takes all the resources for himself, leaving the people famished and in revolt. The reader can’t help but think of the lust and greed of our current leaders, who are leading us by the belly rather than engaging the head. Nor, perhaps, can Fried, who intervenes as Coriolanus struggles to soliloquize, with a “voice-under”: “I, the poet, a Parkinsonian, / must clarify my intention. It isn’t to quibble / about a soliloquy missing from this play; / the hero’s incapable of introspection.”
As a Parkinsonian, the poet reckons not only with the loss of control we all feel in this time of institutional collapse, but also with the literal loss of control over his own body and mind:
Inspired by my own riot of symptoms,
each a churl, a clown, an uncouth lout,
I felt impelled to shout with the mob in the poem,
igniting the hero’s rowdy inner life.
There is a coincident sense of doom: In a time when our leaders refuse to reflect—or are incapable of reflection—the poet’s powers of reflection are also bound to be diminished with the body’s breakdown.
In “ ‘And What Should I Do in Illyria?’ – A Parkinson’s Patient Responds,” Fried steals, or as he says, purloins, lines from Twelfth Night, in which the heroine Viola finds herself shipwrecked in the magical country of Illyria and asks, “What country, friends, is this?” The reply is, “Illyria, which is a nation / fabricated entirely of words.” We too are a nation fabricated of words, and just as words create a mythical country of music, love, and pleasure in Shakespeare, so they create a false reality through social media propaganda and AI slop.
Though the poet escapes from one false reality into another, that of Illyria, he must return to the present time and to his body and its tremors. He leaves Illyria, “governed always by humor and flowing genders,” and returns to “the falters and tremors, / at sea in the slow shipwreck of your body.” Both the poet and his country, the body and the body politic, are falling apart, losing control over words.
The desire to control words is also the subject of “The Deportation,” whose epigraph is a headline from The New York Times: “These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration.” Fried imagines the words that have been scrubbed from federal websites by Trump’s minions—activism, feminism, Black, diverse, LGBTQ, ethnicity, inclusion—
as prisoners lined up on the tarmac, shackled, jumpsuited, and escorted into a C-17 cargo plane: “and flown tonight / to the Oblivion Archipelago / …where they’ll serve no sentence / in perpetuum.” Similarly, in “Breakout,” Shakespeare and Melville’s words are imprisoned:
. . . piled up in the margins
beside the pagination, like a discarded
garment, shmatah of language, torn uniform
in the paced-about cell of a page.
Whether these words are off limits to the reader due to the government’s or the body’s restrictions—or both—we can’t help but sense the darkness closing in, both the darkness of our age and the darkness of aging and death.
Fried provides some comic relief in “Virtual Heath,” where MacBeth’s witches are cast as contemporary social-media influencers who “brew up their new personae, / Heather 1, 2, and 3,” and are “(r)eborn as founders of a long / line of conspiracy mongers . . . equipped to allure / lone travelers (now Internet surfers) with grievance / parlance.”
Equally entertaining is “A Report to the Human Academy,” a soliloquy spoken by a “prototype AI-human hybrid,” in which Fried captures the odd cheerfulness of bot-talk as the half-human bot boasts of its accomplishments: “I’ve mastered / having emotions, goals, and a code to live by.” Not only can this hybrid entity “skewer bad logic and outmaneuver a gambit / in chess or life,” but also, most importantly, it can feel: “And so I feel – another / gift – that the utopian future must be just / around the corner, if only we keep alert!” There’s an innocence, almost a sweetness, to this affirmation of the value of human emotions, and as readers we can’t help but wonder and worry about what this poor, unsuspecting hybrid creature is in for.
The book’s final section, “At the Dimensional Border,” a long poem in twenty numbered segments, is a meditation on death in which the poet as terminal patient submits to being scanned and described by machines in an effort “to pinpoint / pain’s origin and trace the neural path / . . . by superimposing graphs / planes with ruled axes, on the unruly body.” Trapped in an MRI scanner, the poet recalls himself as a child of six writing his name in pencil: “I am a boy made of point, line, and plane / and now, a man, supine and absolutely / still.” Whereas the boy “in rapt silence” delighted in forming the loops and lines that formed his name, the man inside the “cylindrical womb” of the clattering scanner is being written as “this galumphing machine / is signing its name with pictures of my spine.”
The anguish at this loss of agency is palpable. The final segment of the poem arrives at the border between life and death, where “the train is leaving and I am falling asleep / or waking.” Like Hamlet wondering what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Fried asks, “Will I be escorted off the train by the customs police?” and “Is this where the mind must part from its gorgeous creations, / where the body alights but the line continues on?”
This book is a clear-eyed look at the end the poet, and all of us, must face. In case we thought we were exempt, Fried ends the title poem with the lines:
. . . I inherit the universe
and in the same breath bequeath it
to all who’ll be falling after me.
Hilary Sideris is a co-founder and curriculum developer for CUNY Start, a college preparatory program at City University of New York, and a co-host of the Carmine Street Metrics reading series at Otto's Shrunken Head in Manhattan. Her most recent poetry collection, Kissing Ilaria Goodbye, is available from Dos Madres Press.
