• Michael Fried
  (author)
• David Zwirner Books/NONSITE
  ,
  2016
• Purchase Online

Michael Fried (born 1939) is as much a poet as he is a critic. His experiences among artworks and art-world luminaries have resulted in a canonized body of criticism, but they have also provided the raw material for many of the poems in his newest collection, Promesse du Bonheur. Fried’s passion, lyricism and humor–lauded by authors such as Allen Grossman and J.M. Coetzee–are on display as he explores great minds and great works of art that have moved him. Along the way, Fried reveals himself to the reader: he is at once a student, unsure of himself, a young man, ambitious and in love, a committed champion of artists and a poet, transmuting the world around him. The book combines the 80 poems, a mix of lyric and prose poems, with 33 photographs–most of them made, all of them chosen by renowned American photographer James Welling.