Friendly + Fire

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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

AUTHOR

Danielle LaFrance

Following the would-be poetics mapped in JUST LIKE I LIKE IT (Talonbooks, 2019), Danielle LaFrance arrives at thinking and acting from a position where illusions are just that, illusions, and can be destroyed. She authors Friendly + Fire (Talonbooks, 2016) and species branding (Capilano University Editions, 2010). Their fourth poetry project #postdildo thinks and writes through the limitlessness and limitations of sexuality and desire. Focusing on the dildo as sexual object and social relation, they ask “How shall You fuck without causing harm?” Her poetry and critical writing have appeared in The Capilano Review, LESTE, Tripwire, and Organism for Poetic Research, among other journals and magazines. They try to live and hate to rent and work on the stolen lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ peoples.

Reviews

“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

“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

“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