Stay, Illusion: Poems

Bol

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 &;Abandonarium,&; or from habitats where animals are farmed and harmed &;humanely,&; or even from the surreal confines of death row, they find a voice like no other&;dazzling, intimate, startling, heartbreaking. Eddying between the theater of the lavish and the enigmatic, between the gaudy and the unadorned, Brock-Broido&;s verse scours America for material to render unflinchingly the here and now. Grandeur devolves into a comic irony: &;We have come to terms with our Self / Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.&; She dares the unexplained: &;The wings were left ajar / At the altar where I&;ve knelt all night, trembling, leaning, rough / As sugar raw, and sweet.&; Each poem is a rebellious chain of words: &;Be good, they said, and so too I was / Good until I was not.&; 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 &;silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.&; And why create the web? Because: &;If it is written down, you can&;t rescind it.&;

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Pagina's: 112, Editie: Reprint, Paperback, Knopf