Act I of LaFrance's first book, Species Branding, ends with the line: "crippled on my last leg. where are our friends?" It is a question that led to Friendly + Fire (Talonbooks 2016), where LaFrance takes aim at friendship as such.
The Tarnak Farm Incident, where four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were killed by American Air Force pilot Harry Schmidt, is used as source material to navigate and build a discourse of friendship in the 21st century. From this case study, Friendly + Fire interrogates the male subjective experience of war and the gendered implications of camaraderie or "brotherhood" by employing a character named H.S. (his? Harry Schmidt?) on the cheap as a filter for engaging with and through real-life stories of friendly fire.
Friendly + Fire commingles receiving a "pink slip" from an employer with forced affect in the workplace. Work, of course, is another social site where friends are made and ultimately collapse outside the parameters of wage labour. Here is where friends can become comrades.
In Friendly + Fire the mental and physical conditions endured by fighter pilots (suppressed appetite, prescribed sedatives and amphetamines to regulate sleep and stress tolerance) parallel the semiotic and parasitic flows of online friends. The inaccuracy of a war target, of friendly fire, hovers and takes aim at the frivolities of gossip quasi far away from any war zone: "MILITARY LINGO SUBLIMATES SMACK TALK FROM HERE ON IN."
~~ Danielle
Industry Reviews
"LaFrance's Friendly + Fire is composed out of an aesthetic of war and friendship, intimacy and accidents of upheaval, whether political, social or personal, writing out the specifics of armed conflict and intimate acts. Hers is a critique of multiple systems, as well as her own actions, and each thread throughout the collection, interweaving and occasionally getting (deliberately) tangled. In LaFrance's poems, colours and contexts blend."
-rob mclennan
"As smart and swell as [LaFrance's previous book] Species Branding was, Friendly Fire constitutes a considerable ratcheting up of risk, affect, sheer nerve. ... LaFrance's use of 'H.S.' is incisive. ... LaFrance's tone oscillates wildly between Philosophe and Riot Grrrl, which is great for those who prefer to be disturbed. ... Jagged with political sensation. ... A world of milquetoast poetry could benefit from paying heed to Danielle LaFrance's brave aggressions."
-Contemporary Verse 2
"A combination of expose and manifesto and critical historicism, this book gutted me and brought to light the actions and reactions of my daily existence as a testament to the reality of a masculinity shrouded in the subconscious, in the unexamined, in the latency and laziness of the being "dude" (sluggish, slightly gross) in the second decade of the 2000s. And for all of this, I am thankful. ... With this volume following a chapbook and full length, LaFrance is no foreigner to the proverbial pen, and thus every instance of her existence is at once personal and external, prospective and retrospective entwined. The six sections that compose this book are a response to a crime. And they are also an independent and striking look at the retributive act of reflection. An appropriately intelligent book that does not hold back for any person or anything. It rouses, coughs and spits in protest, defies and enlightens all the same. ... In its grimmest moment, Friendly + Fire reminds me of who we are and who we have the potential to be."
-Queen Mob's Tea House
"Friendly + Fire is a capella pornography, a multi-vocal argument concerning the collateral damages attendant upon military aggression, where the exceptional conditions definitive of combat suffuse an everyday civic."
-League of Canadian Poets blog
