Written by Aarik Danielsen of the Columbia Daily Tribune

When does the poet become a prophet?

Does it happen after one line, labored over like brick or bursting forth like electricity, rearranges the wider world? Can it be as the poet travels to and through a series of microphones, hushing crowds with words that explain each member of an audience to themselves?

Certainly, but it might also happen as a poet — in this case, Gabriel Fried — explores the thin places between expressions of gender, faith and doubt, between being an old soul and too young to know any better. Between the very natures of poetry and prophecy themselves.

The University of Missouri professor wears both sets of clothes, conveying all the accompanying power and discomfort, in his latest collection "No Small Thing" (Four Way Books) — to staggering, and often consoling, effect.

Poems that follow the 'Hart'

"Hart," the collection's opening poem, takes the piss out of gender roles overlaid on children while establishing a true sensitivity and perception about the degrees of difference between us.

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Fried's speaker creates a sort of internal antiphon, trading and sanding similar lines to create something complex and textured, that is to say, true to life:

"As a boy I pulled a wagon up a hill

As a girl I pulled a wagon up a hill

collecting timber for the things boys

collecting timber for the things girls

need it for: swords, dogs, rafts, kindling.

need it for: swords, dogs, looms, baskets."

The wagon itself is called by the speaker's father's middle name and also their "heart, hauled behind."

This same sense of being and becoming breaks through the following poem, the brief and potent "Poolside Superhero Triolet." Fried beautifully describes the significant play of children, how mimicking superheroes casts into the future.

"We’re lithe and girlish boys with airy powers each time. We speak a hero’s name. We shift mid-dive, new skills becoming ours," he writes.

In such moments, children are living out the present tense while living for the future, Fried's poems suggests. Another early standout, "The Mole," asks after the true nature of our early motion. We are, in effect, "picking teams" without possibly knowing the implications of our choices, he writes.

"Who’s to say what best prepares us for the world that we will one day lumber through as middle managers. Is it really tender- heartedness? Or is it sidestepping the surrounding violences, redirecting them toward the unarmored ... "

In pieces such as "First Fetish" and "Mischief Night" — the two brief lines of the former poem are worth saving for the reader — we greet more ways childhood might bend into adulthood; ways that sound dangerous but might just bring liberation.

Children of God — or are they?

That very line — between danger and freedom — rings the vast middle of Fried's collection as his speakers consider what it means to speak for God and themselves.

Set in 1930s New York, "Before the Sermon" both reads like an ethnography of 20th-century revivalism and leaves probing questions at the altar. Something strange rises up in the speaker as a "girl in white" takes the meeting stage. ("Too young to be a nurse, / she’s barely not a boy—hair short, flat / as a birch board—a girl who’d sell a good / cause at your door: mental hygiene, democracy / abroad, things even the hopeless hope for.")

"What kind of girl’s a man of God? one of us asks, as she begins," Fried writes.

Some variation, many variations, of this question redound. "Flier" finds a child evangelist advertising their meeting like they're running a lemonade stand ("Popsicles + Benedictions!") while "Toolshed" describes a holy visitation beyond the church's walls, in a much humbler place.

Elsewhere, the poet compares a church meeting to a baseball game, each only somewhat successful in its search for transcendence ("Manifest"); turns a sort of faith around from the perspective of an atheist and one cautiously inspecting the unbeliever; and seeks to divine what a child can know, can actually say of God ("Progeny," "Parenting Triolet").

In the latter of those poems, the speaker takes on a bemused Biblical tone, wondering like Mary and Joseph just who might be in their midst:

"The little god has grown, a little god no longer. Will he answer our prayers now that he’s lifted from our fog a little? God, he’s grown. A little god, a little storm."

A speaker, ostensibly the chosen child themselves, answers back in "Prayer Triolet," trying to understand the very words roiling within, something like "a storm’s nausea" or "a hatchling of exhaustion."

Fried's speaker stakes out an entire genre from within these musings in "Creative Nonfiction":

"Here in the moment of interpolation(the god climbing in to the animal’s skin) I claim my stake."

Together and on their own, the poems of "No Small Thing" offer faith and doubt both more devastating and beautiful treatment than they often receive. And the lines between the child preacher and the adult observer, the poet and the prophet nearly disappear. We all are trying to speak for the worlds raging inside, to speak to the world raging outside, to understand and be understood. Fried's title bears ever true, reminding us there are no tiny gospels or minor prophets.

Learn more about Fried's book at https://fourwaybooks.com/site/no-small-thing/.