Lucie Brock-Broido
National Book Award Finalist ,Stay, Illusion,, the much-anticipated volume of poems by Lucie Brock-Broido, illuminates the broken but beautiful world she inhabits. Her poems are lit with magic and stark with truth: whether they speak from the imagined dwelling of her â€œAbandonarium,â€ or from habitats where animals are farmed and harmed â€œhumanely,â€ or even from the surreal confines of death row, they find a voice like no otherâ€”dazzling, intimate, startling, heartbreaking. ,Eddying between the theater of the lavish and the enigmatic, between the gaudy and the unadorned, Brock-Broidoâ€™s verse scours America for material to render unflinchingly the here and now. Grandeur devolves into a comic irony: â€œWe have come to terms with our Self / Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.â€ She dares the unexplained: â€œThe wings were left ajar / At the altar where Iâ€™ve knelt all night, trembling, leaning, rough / As sugar raw, and sweet.â€ Each poem is a rebellious chain of words: â€œBe good, they said, and so too I was / Good until I was not.â€ Strange narratives, interior and exterior, make a world that is foreign and yet our own; like Dickinson, Brock-Broido constructs a spider-sibling, commanding the â€œsilk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.â€ And why create the web? Because: â€œIf it is written down, you canâ€™t rescind it.â€
Poetry,Nonfiction,Paranormal,Ghosts,Female Authors,Literature,American
Stay, Illusion: Poems