You Don't Get To Be a Saint you don't get to be a saint like stars snow's falling all over town headlights are passing on the walls a god's walking barefoot through the drifts the town drunk's leaning against a tree he sees a dead hand in the snow and reaches down to offer his own you don't get to be a saint the dead man says you get to warm your hands for a moment you get to catch your breath and say one thing I can make you a wizard he says I can give you life forever but I can't take the price off your head I don't want to be a wizard says the drunk I live with the price and I don't mind dying I just want to sing a lullaby he clears his throat and sings the dead man to sleep then he turns into stillness like none ever heard ever more still than snow what others have said: "Witty, lucid, passionate, the long lines of Friesen's poems reach into 'human days that can't be helped' and retrieve images of intimacy and humility. This is a book of dances and conversations: between the poet and his anima, speech and the outward silence of thought, language and gesture. With his customary stateliness and elegance of mind, Friesen engages us to think 'somewhere between yes and no'--a place, as it turns out, filled with the voices of friends." (Sharon Thesen, on You Don't Get to Be a Saint) "Tonight, having just read (twice) the two Anna dances, I say surely Friesen is our best poet. Tomorrow, more moderate, I shall say he is one of our best. No matter. He is very good indeed. And he gets better and better. He writes of 'the flesh and the spirit/the red heart and the blue wind.'" (P. K. Page, on You Don't Get to Be a Saint) "Flicker and Hawk was a revelation. Where had this voice come from--this taut, amazing line, with its gritty humanity and furious equipoise? "The new book confirms that Patrick Friesen is one of the poets we cannot do without. I particularly admire the way poems of private extremis nudge toward the condition of psalms. At their best, they bring news of first and last things: 'there's a limit I guess to art there's no end to desire.'" (Dennis Lee, on You Don't Get to Be a Saint)