[26][2][16] Friedman's verse poetry focused on timeless themes and images grounded in experience: the failures of the family and the American dream, human fallibility, working life, romantic relationships, beauty and loss, and the potency of memory.
[29][23] Friedman's later prose poetry and micro-fiction center on tragicomic parables involving surreal dialogues, actions and situations rooted in imagination, which often displace contemporary psychological, political and existential questions in order to comment on them more fully or obliquely.
[3][33][7][34] The latter two books mixed secular and religious impulses displaying both political consciousness and scorching humor (e.g., "The Golem in the Suburbs," "Night of the Rabbi"), as well as more difficult themes involving death, loss, family conflict and bitterness.
[28][7][27] Taking Down the Angel was noted for its vivid, dynamic sense of lyric, self-propelled narratives, and use of biblical and literary references; the two poems bookending the collection recalled Death of a Salesman in their portrayals of Friedman's father as an icon of the American work ethic and its disappointments.
[3][33][23] Critic William Doreski described the poetic idiom of Black Threads as "shaped by the stern notes of the Torah and the casualness of the quotidian … a model of secular redemption from the burdens of family, self and religion through appreciation of the finely textured material and social world.
[9][31][1] Poetry International compared the stories to the fables of Kafka, Miłosz, Aesop and La Fontaine, noting a "gentle balancing between light and dark, serious and playful" through which Friedman delved into human isolation, desire, inadequacy and guilt.
[1] In Floating Tales (2017), Friedman offered prose mini-stories and comic sketches similarly influenced by Kafka, fabulists and biblical writers, as well as Zbigniew Herbert, which interwove absurd, mundane and oneiric worlds.
[5][37][38] These stories often rendered the figurative literal, taking the results to logical, if surreal, conclusions that—no matter how strange—were believable due to the work's plain, rational language, keenly observed detail and physical grounding.