Winner of Best Poetry Book by the Society of Midland Authors On the Overnight Train collects a lifetime of thought and writing by Alice Friman, presenting poems of passion and permission, gravity and humor, alongside a great deal of truth telling peppered with the salt of invention. Here even the dead clink glasses and remain as alive and present as ever. Here the old stories abide and the new ones, written at the tail end of a life, face the inevitable with clear-eyed candor, wit, and grace. As Stephen Corey writes in his introduction, “Friman’s poetry is still kicking ass and breaking hearts as she steams toward ninety,” and On the Overnight Train captures the world of a distinctive poet whose work is vivid, understandable, and emotionally honest. “Alice Friman writes poems like no other. Whether rummaging the storehouse of memory, humanizing the celestial, or pondering from the ‘high / hill of age’ poetry’s ageless subjects―life, love, and death―she refracts it all through the dual prisms of her inimitable wit and her pain-etched but supremely open heart. Prepare, reader, to laugh as she breaks yours.” -- Mark Drew “Stricken, amused, this poet welcomes the dire, the ordinary, the strange, love from all angles into years and years. Under the autobiographical, it’s the Greeks, the Bible, great paintings, great literature: backdrop and wild intervention in our motley human business. The playful beauty can’t fool us. A dead-earnest curiosity’s at work. Reverence. A poet telling us what we must know.” -- Marianne Boruch “Spanning many years and multiple volumes, On the Overnight Train offers readers a master class in poetry from one of our best practitioners of the art. Friman’s previous books memorably probed her relationships with her dead parents; in her new poems, she shifts her gaze to consider her own mortality. In light of the cardiac arrest described in ‘A Walk in the Park,’ these new poems feel especially urgent and essential, but every page of the collection is a triumph.” -- Chelsea Rathburn Winner of Best Poetry Book by the Society of Midland Authors Introduction by Stephen Corey Alice Friman is professor emerita of English and creative writing at the University of Indianapolis. She now lives in Georgia, where she was poet-in-residence at Georgia College. Winner of the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry, she is a recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and is featured in Best American Poetry .