Edith Friedman is the author of Reconstruction, winner of the 2024 Lefty Blondie Press First Chapbook Award. As our 2025 contest opens, Friedman reflects on how poetry can connect people to another person’s experience, to the possibilities of language, and to feeling less alone.
[This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.]
When I emailed friends to announce the publication of my first chapbook by this extremely supportive and affirming press, I wanted to share my euphoria. Poems I made are recognized as worth reading! By people who don’t already know me! How to convey? “Lonely offices” bubbled up from the murky sourdough starter that is my mind. It’s a phrase in Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays.” It does not refer to writing poems. But could it?
Poetry asks me to use words carefully. “Hey mom, what’s oleaginous?” calls my son from the couch. Someone showed up in a suit with an oleaginous luster in the book he’s reading. “Gloppy, like egg whites,” I say, then look it up just in case. (It’s unctuous, but also oily and ingratiating—I wonder where this character will end up.)
There’s a compulsion there, in that word “office”— we have to go to work. For the past seven years, it seems I have to write poems. While the poems I write begin and end with other people (family, friends, people I’ve never met), it’s down to me to put those experiences into words. It’s well-known that writing is a lonesome task, especially when those chancy beings you hoped would show up to your page drag their feet. Even when others are around me, getting from zero to a first draft means closing myself to interaction.
I try to write in the mornings, when it’s quiet in my shared office and my brain feels least sluggish. I may not feel lonely when actually composing (vs. noodling around on the page or just customizing this urgent email/eating oatmeal/counting fruit flies/etc). But plugging through the before, after, and in-between mental sludge, I’m lonely.
Merriam-Webster reminds me that “office” carries many meanings—duty, ceremony, form of worship, and service to another. In the Robert Hayden poem, the lonely offices are not places of business, but duties, services, perhaps a form of worship: heating the house, polishing a child’s shoes. Hayden calls these actions love’s offices. Among other kinds of labor, writing poems can be a labor of love.
In Hayden’s poem, love’s lonely offices are also austere, which to me evokes a kind of stern minimalism, but whose etymological roots mean harsh, strict or cruel. The love in the poem is complicated by economic pressures, anger (perhaps abuse), parent-child dynamics, and freezing weather. When poetry reflects the complexity of real lives and relationships, reading it helps us feel less alone.
There’s a way in which all the poems in my chapbook are love poems, even when they look like poems of grief, anger or loss. Lefty Blondie Press’s recognition has given them and me a sheen, a non-oleaginous luster. As a writer of poems, I feel less alone. I hope reading the poems will help others feel that way.
Lefty Blondie Press First Chapbook Award
Submit your chapbook manuscripts from JANUARY 1 - MARCH 31, 2025
We welcome poetry chapbook manuscripts written by those who:
self-identify as woman or non-binary individual
40+ years old
writing in English
have yet to publish a poetry chapbook or full-length poetry book before September 30, 2025
We're trying something NEW for the 2025 First Chapbook Contest submissions!
Introducing the pay-what-you-can reading fee via Duosuma tip jar!
All tip jar donations support LBP's mission:
To promote the poetry of self-identifying women and non-binary people.
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