Joel Friederich is Assistant Professor of English and Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Barron County. He has published two chapbooks, Without Us and The Body We Gather. His poems have appeared in Witness, Prairie Schooner, The Paris Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and River Styx. He lives with his wife Lee, a scholar and translator, and their two sons in Tokyo, Japan, and Northwest Wisconsin.

Books by Joel Friederich:

Other poems on the web by Joel Friederich:
Two poems

About Blue to Fill the Empty Heaven:

"There is in these poems a discomfited lyricism, a longing for the borders between body and body, father and son, wilderness and flesh, dead and not yet, to be permeable, a longing for an idiom, a grammar, that allows for a perfect translation, the alkahest that will dissolve sorrow just enough to transmute everyday grief into a meaningful grace."
—Kellie Wells

"Joel Friederich's poems in this collection are lyrical translations from the natural world, exhibiting close observation, a finely attuned ear, and a great deal of tenderness towards the inhabitants of this world. He also writes beautifully of the stages of human life, with insight into both the obvious and the not-so-obvious rituals that see us through those stages. He often uses the vehicle of the personal, but always manages to find a destination beyond the merely personal. Blue to Fill the Empty Heaven is a book filled with the riches of earthly life.
—Max Garland