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Stay, Illusion: Poems
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 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 “We have come to terms with our Self / Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.” She dares the “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 “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? “If it is written down, you can’t rescind it.”
113 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2013
42 people are currently reading
1152 people want to read
About the author
Lucie Brock-Broido
16 books68 followersLucie Brock-Broido was the author of four collections of poetry. She has received many honors, including the Witter-Bynner prize of Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, the Harvard-Danforth Award for Distinction in Teaching, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She was described as an Elliptical Poet by critic Stephen Burt.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 89 reviews
September 3, 2013
Lucie Brock-Broido embodies the myth of the Poet as someone separate, hiding in alcoves as a child and hiding in imagination as an adult. Yet the poems of *Stay, Illusion* connect with others, confess a need for touch if not for understanding. There’s an undercurrent of vulnerability that does not detract from their artfulness, but rather includes readers in the art. Although only one poem is dedicated to Brock-Broido’s late friend Liam Rector, he appears elsewhere, haunting the collection as in “Little Industry of Ghosts,” which concludes “Would that our Liam were living still.” But the speaker knows that he is not, making these poems a sort of tug-o-war between reality and wishful thinking.
Brock-Broido’s poetry has always been transcendent, able to leap into the otherworldly at will. *Stay, Illusion* is not grounded, but it is human, dealing with hospitals and schools as easily as eels and celestial ladders. It begs rather than believes that illusions will stay, acknowledging all along the realities of our mortality: “Did I forget to mention that when you’re dead // You’re dead a long time.” In some ways, every poem of this collection is an elegy and, as such, contemplates the ever after with ferocious hope that it exists.
Imitators of Brock-Broido are sometimes criticized for their non sequiturs, but every turn of this book feels intentional. Which is not to say that these poems are easy—oh no, these are poems at their most challenging best. The language careens without ever losing control. The Poet shows us the serious work that poetry can do.
Disclaimer: Lucie was once my teacher, but this is still the best collection I’ve read this year (and it’s been a strong year for poetry thus far).
Brock-Broido’s poetry has always been transcendent, able to leap into the otherworldly at will. *Stay, Illusion* is not grounded, but it is human, dealing with hospitals and schools as easily as eels and celestial ladders. It begs rather than believes that illusions will stay, acknowledging all along the realities of our mortality: “Did I forget to mention that when you’re dead // You’re dead a long time.” In some ways, every poem of this collection is an elegy and, as such, contemplates the ever after with ferocious hope that it exists.
Imitators of Brock-Broido are sometimes criticized for their non sequiturs, but every turn of this book feels intentional. Which is not to say that these poems are easy—oh no, these are poems at their most challenging best. The language careens without ever losing control. The Poet shows us the serious work that poetry can do.
Disclaimer: Lucie was once my teacher, but this is still the best collection I’ve read this year (and it’s been a strong year for poetry thus far).
January 20, 2019
Just gorgeous. Haunting. With lines that sometimes drive right through the heart.
October 21, 2025
so good, so strange, so fabulous......and she only ever wrote four collections??? unbelievable 😭😭😭
Read
May 17, 2024in your glass case now, canary, in your
tin can purged of all its minerals,
you are beautiful, grotesque 🥺
tin can purged of all its minerals,
you are beautiful, grotesque 🥺
November 2, 2013
(Read during Day 2 of NaNoReadMo.)
This book of poetry has to win the National Book Award. It has to, because I almost couldn't stand to read it. It is poems like this that convince me I will never be a writer! Even the obsession with death and loss couldn't steer me away from these poems.
You have to see for yourself. One of my favorites is online at Poets.org - A Meadow. Start there!
A little blurb from A Meadow:
"He might have been
Half-beautiful in a certain optic nerve
Of light, but legible only at particular
Less snowy distances."
Other favorite poems included:
For a Clouded Leopard in Another Life
Extreme Wisteria
("Intimacy with others, sateen. Exreme hyacinth as evidence. Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves will (perhaps tomorrow) die.")
Moon River
("Unhitched to anything,
I forgive you - everything.
Besides,
You've always been such an odd uncanny half-genet of a man.")
We Have Always Live in the Castle (named after Shirley Jackson's novel)
("It was always autumn in the paraphernalia of my laudanums....")
Cave Painting of a Dun Horse
("I had dreams that were inhumane to me.
The smaller the light to write to becomes, the more
I have to say to you.")
A Cage Goes in Search of a Bird
Of course, these are all segments, and the poems are best in their entireties.
This book of poetry has to win the National Book Award. It has to, because I almost couldn't stand to read it. It is poems like this that convince me I will never be a writer! Even the obsession with death and loss couldn't steer me away from these poems.
You have to see for yourself. One of my favorites is online at Poets.org - A Meadow. Start there!
A little blurb from A Meadow:
"He might have been
Half-beautiful in a certain optic nerve
Of light, but legible only at particular
Less snowy distances."
Other favorite poems included:
For a Clouded Leopard in Another Life
Extreme Wisteria
("Intimacy with others, sateen. Exreme hyacinth as evidence. Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves will (perhaps tomorrow) die.")
Moon River
("Unhitched to anything,
I forgive you - everything.
Besides,
You've always been such an odd uncanny half-genet of a man.")
We Have Always Live in the Castle (named after Shirley Jackson's novel)
("It was always autumn in the paraphernalia of my laudanums....")
Cave Painting of a Dun Horse
("I had dreams that were inhumane to me.
The smaller the light to write to becomes, the more
I have to say to you.")
A Cage Goes in Search of a Bird
Of course, these are all segments, and the poems are best in their entireties.
October 14, 2018
These poems are like...
1 part T.S. Eliot
1 part Florence + The Machine lyrics
1 part ???
I didn't get all of them; I think some were silly; but I quite enjoyed reading them. They made me feel gothy and baroque. Kind of perfect for a chilly October when the world is ending.
1 part T.S. Eliot
1 part Florence + The Machine lyrics
1 part ???
I didn't get all of them; I think some were silly; but I quite enjoyed reading them. They made me feel gothy and baroque. Kind of perfect for a chilly October when the world is ending.
April 25, 2014
National Book award nominee of 2013. Great title, and there's her own ghosts in it, principally her friend Liam. Language rich. Aphoristic, in places. Lyrical, sort of haunted and haunting. Still, I was not taken by many of the poems, as driven as they all seem to be by a similar aesthetic and tone and strategy.
December 30, 2013
Baroque. Gorgeous. Inimitable.
September 12, 2019
This is good, but I think I would have been more excited about it 10 years ago.
Read
April 7, 2023Video forthcoming on Leaf by Leaf, along with Brock-Broido’s other collections.
April 14, 2025
Going to bed I ask my husband,
Could you get me my book?
Which one?
It has a goat or gazelle or unicorn on it.
You think this is vague,
But once you see it you know
Without doubt-
This one.
-----------------
Many of these poems I did not understand on a literal level but this could be because I didn't give the poems enough time or perhaps I am just dense. I can be quite dense. But the literal level wasn't necessary for enjoyment; The poems were dreamlike and absolutely entrancing. I didn't mind not understanding being led from one image to the next and through odd syntax. (Even my husband, who usually hates not getting the literal level, enjoyed them.) Her titles really are excellent. (I have such a hard time titling things.) And I loved all the equestrian imagery.
Could you get me my book?
Which one?
It has a goat or gazelle or unicorn on it.
You think this is vague,
But once you see it you know
Without doubt-
This one.
-----------------
Many of these poems I did not understand on a literal level but this could be because I didn't give the poems enough time or perhaps I am just dense. I can be quite dense. But the literal level wasn't necessary for enjoyment; The poems were dreamlike and absolutely entrancing. I didn't mind not understanding being led from one image to the next and through odd syntax. (Even my husband, who usually hates not getting the literal level, enjoyed them.) Her titles really are excellent. (I have such a hard time titling things.) And I loved all the equestrian imagery.
June 14, 2018
Brock-Broido’s third poetry collection had five sections of ten poems, which reminded me of a Dominican rosary; her fourth book, Stay, Illusion has four sections of 16 poems each. Brock-Broido, who died in early March, seemed fond of patterns and balance, even though, as with trapeze artists or tight-rope walkers, there is ever the challenge of gravity’s pull on every movement that could fall fast or soar successfully with an exchange of grip or a foot slip. Her poems are vivid, risky, and dynamic, moving with unexpected shifts in image or tone. For the reader there is a circus audience’s wonder about the poem’s journey from start to finish, a little awe, some of which comes from the daring, some from the mystery inherent in sudden, precise action, which in a poet is the choice of image, word, structure. Some mystery (and meaning) also derives from the musicality of each poem. Brock-Broido’s poems sing in modes of joy, sorrow, bitterness, anger, and wonder.
The book’s title comes from the ending lines of the poem “Uncollected Poem,” but she will reverse the order for her title:
While there is no “Stay, Illusion” poem title there are: “Dove, Interrupted” and “Father, In Drawer” and “Dove, Abiding” and “Bird, Singing” and another poem begins “Stay, little ounce…” These compositional patterns, syntactical and verbal, are elusive to me—I am not given to puzzles and/or literary games—but are somehow inviting, not off-putting. Why? As the Geoffrey Rush character in “Shakespeare in Love” explains, “I dunno. It’s a mystery.”
There is also this: on page 20 of Trouble in Mind appears the lines:
On page 20 of Stay, Illusion appears a poem called “For a Clouded Leopard in Another Life.” There are other linkages (or continuities, sequels) between the third and fourth volumes and who knows what similarly overt connections among all four of her books. The poems work independent magic without this awareness of echoing patterns.
I have to return Stay, Illusion to the library and begin the search for my own copies—to have these exquisite things to hand, to read again, to cross-compare volumes. I am just beginning my reading of this elegant, challenging, musical poet, whose poems also conjure images of medieval manuscript illustrations, tapestries, Renaissance paintings, Dutch still-lifes, and even gritty black and white news photographs.
The book’s title comes from the ending lines of the poem “Uncollected Poem,” but she will reverse the order for her title:
“Know exquisite things—
Reveal your form, illusion
Stay—a cut sewn up by the quartet of sad-stringed
Instruments made of cat-gut ligatures still used
In certain open-hearted surgeries.”
While there is no “Stay, Illusion” poem title there are: “Dove, Interrupted” and “Father, In Drawer” and “Dove, Abiding” and “Bird, Singing” and another poem begins “Stay, little ounce…” These compositional patterns, syntactical and verbal, are elusive to me—I am not given to puzzles and/or literary games—but are somehow inviting, not off-putting. Why? As the Geoffrey Rush character in “Shakespeare in Love” explains, “I dunno. It’s a mystery.”
There is also this: on page 20 of Trouble in Mind appears the lines:
“As long as the clouded leopards
Surround the clouded bed with their gold & cirrus
Air, I will be there too.”
On page 20 of Stay, Illusion appears a poem called “For a Clouded Leopard in Another Life.” There are other linkages (or continuities, sequels) between the third and fourth volumes and who knows what similarly overt connections among all four of her books. The poems work independent magic without this awareness of echoing patterns.
I have to return Stay, Illusion to the library and begin the search for my own copies—to have these exquisite things to hand, to read again, to cross-compare volumes. I am just beginning my reading of this elegant, challenging, musical poet, whose poems also conjure images of medieval manuscript illustrations, tapestries, Renaissance paintings, Dutch still-lifes, and even gritty black and white news photographs.
“Tookie was a big man,Later: “On his last night here on earth, he took only milk.” A full poem, “A Girl Ago”:
The warden said, But it’s only salt that stops
The heart—you know—that simple.”
No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing
In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no
Buttering. No making small contusions on the page
But saying nothing no one has said before.
No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs.
No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush
Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish.
Extinguish me from this.
I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost
And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia,
Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above
And on a bare branch in a shepherd’s sky. No Dove.
There is no thou to speak of.
December 24, 2013
A bit about how I came to pick-up Lucie Brock-Broido's latest: It's been a year of screaming dullness for me. It began with a friend - the talented, too talented and too romantic and too everything kind, dying for reasons very much connected to his twin afflictions of talent and romance. This was the second time I'd seen this happen in as many years and the repetition compounded the message: That vision isn't just seeing, it's finding a way to survive all you've seen.
In any event, my talented friends kept dying or destroying themselves, while I, way less talented and far more terrified, spent the year trying to play by the rules for once. I fought for a dull job and even the fight was dull. I wrapped myself in the things that comforted me and I tried my hand at being a responsible adult.
A younger me would have become bored and rejected this year as stasis and stagnation. Lucky for me, I'm older. This year was healing. I learned, and probably still am learning, what my limits are. I used to believe that limits were things imposed by others, rules to be broken. They can be that, but more importantly, limits are the boundaries you define; what you will accept and reject, what is recognizably you (to you) and what, even when imposed on you by others, needs rejection.
Which is a long way of getting to the heart of "Stay, Illusion."
After a year of reading serious and practical things, I needed some poetry and a chance recommendation led me to this collection, which, like all the best writing, spoke directly to me and my situation.
These are poems about limits (private gardens, prisons and isolated homes figure prominently) and how we define them externally through language and internally through our sense of self intersecting with our sense of those around us, our histories (both private and shared) and with the world-at-large. It's not poetry that moralizes, but rather poetry that explores the ambiguity of life with a clear-eyed and tender voice.
It's also some damn fine writing. Even if you don't like poetry, give it a shot.
In any event, my talented friends kept dying or destroying themselves, while I, way less talented and far more terrified, spent the year trying to play by the rules for once. I fought for a dull job and even the fight was dull. I wrapped myself in the things that comforted me and I tried my hand at being a responsible adult.
A younger me would have become bored and rejected this year as stasis and stagnation. Lucky for me, I'm older. This year was healing. I learned, and probably still am learning, what my limits are. I used to believe that limits were things imposed by others, rules to be broken. They can be that, but more importantly, limits are the boundaries you define; what you will accept and reject, what is recognizably you (to you) and what, even when imposed on you by others, needs rejection.
Which is a long way of getting to the heart of "Stay, Illusion."
After a year of reading serious and practical things, I needed some poetry and a chance recommendation led me to this collection, which, like all the best writing, spoke directly to me and my situation.
These are poems about limits (private gardens, prisons and isolated homes figure prominently) and how we define them externally through language and internally through our sense of self intersecting with our sense of those around us, our histories (both private and shared) and with the world-at-large. It's not poetry that moralizes, but rather poetry that explores the ambiguity of life with a clear-eyed and tender voice.
It's also some damn fine writing. Even if you don't like poetry, give it a shot.
January 18, 2016
Vibrantly musical, the language casts a spell. You'll leave this book feeling awakened, as if you're seeing the world for the first time. The poem "Freedom of Speech" was probably my favorite in the book: "I adore you more. I know / the wingspan of your voice." This is the first book of Lucie Brock-Broido's I've read, and her ability with language is nothing short of magical. Read this book!
November 6, 2013
Lucie Brock-Broido is practically my dream poet. Intricate, opulent, tactile, spooky, slippery, her hair's insane. Maybe this isn't her best but it's pretty magical. Gorgeous. Romantic. Look, I can't convey its beauty, what do I look like, an actual book reviewer?
July 17, 2021
I wanted to read this after reading Mark Wunderlich's elegy to her in God of Nothingness, but I wasn't prepared, initially, for the kind of poems this book contains. It took reading several of them without understanding what I was reading before I began to find Brock-Broido's level.
I think in part that's because these are not autobio poems, that they don't necessarily develop a particular persona or experience. Instead these are questing, question-asking poems that follow a thought in weird directions. Easy reading is frustrated, too, by what I think is some playful, associative spelling and word choice, so a key word will be replaced by another similar sounding word, like say, replacing "house" with "horse" to give you "a horse is not a home." It's evocative, but I think it encouraged me to adopt a kind of loose reading, where I'd try to follow the general drift of the poems instead of the particulars. And this worked well enough where Brock-Broido's lines are super-musical. Reading it a little is like overhearing a band practicing next door. You know the melody, as a reader, but you keep thinking the lyrics you're singing can't be the right ones.
There are, obliquely, some autobio elements here. I think a lot of these poems are grieving. There might be a parent suffering dementia and coming out of focus in that way. But I could also be imagining that.
The poems often have funny, self-referential titles-- "Uncollected Poem," etc. There's a lot to like here, and part of me wonders what these poems would reveal to me if I sat with them for six months or a year, instead of a week. Recommended; I'd read more.
I think in part that's because these are not autobio poems, that they don't necessarily develop a particular persona or experience. Instead these are questing, question-asking poems that follow a thought in weird directions. Easy reading is frustrated, too, by what I think is some playful, associative spelling and word choice, so a key word will be replaced by another similar sounding word, like say, replacing "house" with "horse" to give you "a horse is not a home." It's evocative, but I think it encouraged me to adopt a kind of loose reading, where I'd try to follow the general drift of the poems instead of the particulars. And this worked well enough where Brock-Broido's lines are super-musical. Reading it a little is like overhearing a band practicing next door. You know the melody, as a reader, but you keep thinking the lyrics you're singing can't be the right ones.
There are, obliquely, some autobio elements here. I think a lot of these poems are grieving. There might be a parent suffering dementia and coming out of focus in that way. But I could also be imagining that.
The poems often have funny, self-referential titles-- "Uncollected Poem," etc. There's a lot to like here, and part of me wonders what these poems would reveal to me if I sat with them for six months or a year, instead of a week. Recommended; I'd read more.
December 4, 2020
surreal and beautiful, but difficult to tie down and understand fully. these poems can mean many things to many people, observing a dream logic without surrendering to nonsense. to me, she really emerges out of precise one-line sections that rise out of the rest that hit with alarming accuracy.
August 14, 2019
This collection is magnificent. Each poem required pause and reflection, the best to be hoped for from literature.
Read
September 23, 2023my memories are mished and mashed but maybe my favourite from lucie. she's like. a luxurious rug all gold trim and borzois
June 7, 2024
Poems that each exist in their own world, conforming to few rules. Beautiful in their diction, syntax, and surprising imagery and connections.
March 4, 2024
“How is it I did not know the swath / Of you, rare, more rare.”
December 23, 2020
I took a long time to read this book to savor the words and the poems themselves. As is often her style, Brock-Broido writes about death. She often finds obscure subjects who have lived their lives on the fringes of society and ultimately died as a results of their acts against society. I do love reading her works and wish we had her here still.
July 31, 2025
there i slept in the fold folds of the executioner’s robe,
all that fabric spilling
out before him like unbundled honey from its jars
i am alive
now. it is the first night of the year. the air is salt
even this far inland. i wish on a planet, thinking it’s a star.
on stars you can wish.
all that fabric spilling
out before him like unbundled honey from its jars
i am alive
now. it is the first night of the year. the air is salt
even this far inland. i wish on a planet, thinking it’s a star.
on stars you can wish.
February 14, 2020
So weird! Some poems heard to Get, ya know. Was frustrating to look up words then realize they were nature words whose specificities would be lost on me either way. But! Cool? Some lines and moods really landed with me, despite moving forward/back in the poem and then not knowing where I was. I want to write as confidently/flippantly about whether or not I'm understood. And produce crazy images (in weird irregular forms, always) as a result: "there were swans / Pretending to be boats that carried people / Who imagined they felt joy" ("The Pianist").
Lots about death, the (lack of) an afterlife. "A Meadow": "One thing. One thing. One thing: / Tell me there is / A meadow, afterward." Death row, death beds. Her weirdness made it hard to hold on, feel some sort of conviction about her Political topics, e.g., executions, the UN introducing cholera to Haiti.
Read this book too right after Mary Oliver's Dream Work, both seem books by older wise ladies who love themselves, their flaws, their power to hurt (esp Brock-Broido) more than young people do. Though in Brock-Broido's hands feels a bit less healing, more.. Feckless? I loved "Uncollected Poem" where the speaker actively refuses resolution: "Unfold for me but do not leave me / Wise, or full. Do not leave me knowing, known." "Gouldian Kit": "Everything one does is fear / Not being of this world or in this world enough." Then the dangerous speaker in "Cave Painting of a Dun Horse": "The etching of your dying as it was / That many years ago, when I chose its acid touch for you."
She makes love very goofy and fun, including/especially the pain of it. It's next to death in "Eight Takes of Trakl as Himself," "Of the dear dead, how beautiful / It was to walk in the misbegotten shadows / Of the chalk deer/ Huddle-grazing / In the frisk of misbelief, / By day, with you." "Moon River" drove me wild!!! "Like a lantern-boat half on fire somewhere down / The crazy river of your mind… / Still, I go on crossing you in style."
Also enjoy her touches of linguistic excess. I am not yet brave enough to do these! "I took his blond face in my hands and kissed him blondely on the mouth" in "Currying the Fallow-Colored Horse," "morning / Came each morning" in "For a Snow Leopard in October."
Lots about death, the (lack of) an afterlife. "A Meadow": "One thing. One thing. One thing: / Tell me there is / A meadow, afterward." Death row, death beds. Her weirdness made it hard to hold on, feel some sort of conviction about her Political topics, e.g., executions, the UN introducing cholera to Haiti.
Read this book too right after Mary Oliver's Dream Work, both seem books by older wise ladies who love themselves, their flaws, their power to hurt (esp Brock-Broido) more than young people do. Though in Brock-Broido's hands feels a bit less healing, more.. Feckless? I loved "Uncollected Poem" where the speaker actively refuses resolution: "Unfold for me but do not leave me / Wise, or full. Do not leave me knowing, known." "Gouldian Kit": "Everything one does is fear / Not being of this world or in this world enough." Then the dangerous speaker in "Cave Painting of a Dun Horse": "The etching of your dying as it was / That many years ago, when I chose its acid touch for you."
She makes love very goofy and fun, including/especially the pain of it. It's next to death in "Eight Takes of Trakl as Himself," "Of the dear dead, how beautiful / It was to walk in the misbegotten shadows / Of the chalk deer/ Huddle-grazing / In the frisk of misbelief, / By day, with you." "Moon River" drove me wild!!! "Like a lantern-boat half on fire somewhere down / The crazy river of your mind… / Still, I go on crossing you in style."
Also enjoy her touches of linguistic excess. I am not yet brave enough to do these! "I took his blond face in my hands and kissed him blondely on the mouth" in "Currying the Fallow-Colored Horse," "morning / Came each morning" in "For a Snow Leopard in October."
November 9, 2014
I picked this up because the cover is so, so pretty. This is also a great title for a book of poetry, really. But especially for this collection. You know that it is haunted by so many things.
I ended up liking this a lot. She is a very lyrical poet. I loved her attention to sound, and her language is lush. Sometimes her poems are impenetrable in this collection and I just felt around the edges. That irritates me, but when I let that go then I enjoyed myself, the indecipherable movements I got. And, sometimes I went in brain first and ended up drawing my breath. There is a dark, sad undercurrent of loss and despair here, a desperation to make the illusions and past memories stay.
Favorites:
A Meadow
In this district of late/ Last light, indicated by the hour/ Of the beauty of his neck,...
Three: he did not find my empathy/ Supernatural, at the very least!
When I saw this spectacle, I wanted to live for/ A moment for a moment. However inelegant it was,/ It was what it might have been to be alive, but tenderly./ One thing. One thing. One thing:/ Tell me there is/ A meadow, afterward.
You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously To This World
Of Tookie Williams
For A Clouded Leopard In Another Life
In April, a tiny feline on the ledges of a billow cloud,/ Or like a finch let loose in the mossery, you were ended/ Unexpectedly; what is only left of you is me.
Contributor's Note
Humane Farming
oh my god, this poem, just go find it.:
Clip-winged, unbeaked,/ Take refuge by the heat, the scald of thought, made most magical/ For those, in dark, who find their own way by the light of others' eyes.
Ughhhhhhhh
Silentium
Great Reckoning in a Little Room
Yes, I am dissembling.
When I say yes, the streetlamp's cylinder of light will come into the room./ It is the last light you will ever stand inside the perfect circle of./ Swallow swallow, deep as the skirts of lingonberries brambling in a blacker forest/ And shallow, shallow, you will lay you down.
Death, XXL
We Have Always Lived In The Castle
Of my own venatic arts, everything I have ever killed had never been alive.
/I'm not bored yet./ And all the dark I did is done.
I ended up liking this a lot. She is a very lyrical poet. I loved her attention to sound, and her language is lush. Sometimes her poems are impenetrable in this collection and I just felt around the edges. That irritates me, but when I let that go then I enjoyed myself, the indecipherable movements I got. And, sometimes I went in brain first and ended up drawing my breath. There is a dark, sad undercurrent of loss and despair here, a desperation to make the illusions and past memories stay.
Favorites:
A Meadow
In this district of late/ Last light, indicated by the hour/ Of the beauty of his neck,...
Three: he did not find my empathy/ Supernatural, at the very least!
When I saw this spectacle, I wanted to live for/ A moment for a moment. However inelegant it was,/ It was what it might have been to be alive, but tenderly./ One thing. One thing. One thing:/ Tell me there is/ A meadow, afterward.
You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously To This World
Of Tookie Williams
For A Clouded Leopard In Another Life
In April, a tiny feline on the ledges of a billow cloud,/ Or like a finch let loose in the mossery, you were ended/ Unexpectedly; what is only left of you is me.
Contributor's Note
Humane Farming
oh my god, this poem, just go find it.:
Clip-winged, unbeaked,/ Take refuge by the heat, the scald of thought, made most magical/ For those, in dark, who find their own way by the light of others' eyes.
Ughhhhhhhh
Silentium
Great Reckoning in a Little Room
Yes, I am dissembling.
When I say yes, the streetlamp's cylinder of light will come into the room./ It is the last light you will ever stand inside the perfect circle of./ Swallow swallow, deep as the skirts of lingonberries brambling in a blacker forest/ And shallow, shallow, you will lay you down.
Death, XXL
We Have Always Lived In The Castle
Of my own venatic arts, everything I have ever killed had never been alive.
/I'm not bored yet./ And all the dark I did is done.
September 8, 2015
Extreme Wisteria
On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.
The hydrangea of her crushed each year a little more into the attar of herself.
Pallid. Injured. Wild in ecstasy. A throat to come home to, tupelo.
Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.
Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.
Case history: wistful, woke most every afternoon
In the green rooms of the Abandonarium.
Beautiful cage, asylum in.
Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not have been there.
So few wild raspberries, they were countable and triaged out by hand.
Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others, sateen.
Extreme hyacinth as evidence.
Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves
Will (perhaps tomorrow) die.
High editorial illusion of “control.” Early childhood: measles, scarlet fevers.
Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home;
Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations was for her.
Unusual coalition of early deaths.
Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence,
In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of such.
Wisteria, extreme.
There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.
On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.
The hydrangea of her crushed each year a little more into the attar of herself.
Pallid. Injured. Wild in ecstasy. A throat to come home to, tupelo.
Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.
Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.
Case history: wistful, woke most every afternoon
In the green rooms of the Abandonarium.
Beautiful cage, asylum in.
Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not have been there.
So few wild raspberries, they were countable and triaged out by hand.
Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others, sateen.
Extreme hyacinth as evidence.
Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves
Will (perhaps tomorrow) die.
High editorial illusion of “control.” Early childhood: measles, scarlet fevers.
Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home;
Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations was for her.
Unusual coalition of early deaths.
Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence,
In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of such.
Wisteria, extreme.
There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.
May 7, 2014
The title of Brock-Broido's book is perfect. Taken from Horatio's exhortation to King Hamlet's ghost to remain a few moments longer and explain himself, prove his existence, keep the watchers company a few, fleeting seconds longer, it embodies the thrust Brock-Broido's poems wonderfully.
There is so much magic and these lines, literal meaning always just out of reach. Brock-Broido is a master of the surprising turn of phrase, and these appear on almost every page of the book "Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not/Blow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin./The flowerbed is black, sumptuous in emptiness." Language is the thing that saves us and the world, as Brock-Broido says, "If it is written down, you can't rescind it." Or more imagistically, here: "Now the Eskimos are frightened at the robins in their weirdly warming/Village because their language has no word for robin--not quite yet." Indeed, we only understand, we only love that which we can name.
One note...towards the end of this collection, I did become a bit fatigued by the sort of gauze that enwraps these poems. I was never sure where things were going or where the floor was. This was taxing after a while. Hence the four stars rather than five.
There is so much magic and these lines, literal meaning always just out of reach. Brock-Broido is a master of the surprising turn of phrase, and these appear on almost every page of the book "Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not/Blow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin./The flowerbed is black, sumptuous in emptiness." Language is the thing that saves us and the world, as Brock-Broido says, "If it is written down, you can't rescind it." Or more imagistically, here: "Now the Eskimos are frightened at the robins in their weirdly warming/Village because their language has no word for robin--not quite yet." Indeed, we only understand, we only love that which we can name.
One note...towards the end of this collection, I did become a bit fatigued by the sort of gauze that enwraps these poems. I was never sure where things were going or where the floor was. This was taxing after a while. Hence the four stars rather than five.
March 7, 2017
Incidentally, my forthcoming album shares its title with this book. We both like Hamlet.
Words I learned from this book: trilobite, tamp, portière, retinue, tourniquet, venatic, syrinx, wold, castrato, sejant, besotted, seersucker, capuchin, grok, pram, vocable (n.), fetlock, hillock, neurasthenic, escutcheon, civet, natter, mummery, curlew, cortège, sacrarium, budgerigar, Hindemith, trammel, batiste, crinoline, Ashkenazi, abbatoir*, bitumen, bowered, physiognomy, dementia praecox, Trakl, barberry, coquettish, poplin, curry (v.), bower, odalisque, dirndl, boy-weed, excelsior, pinafore, linsey-woolsey, Bokhara, harrier, attar, sateen, ersatz, irides, conjunctivae, glossolalia.
*(sic - I wonder if it isn't her own modification of "abattoir," as flavored by either "abba" or "abbot.")
Also, kinds of berries that appear in this book: chinaberry, thimbleberry, barberry, raspberry (twice), lingonberry, black cherry*,
*not a berry? though who cares because strawberries aren't technically berries while pumpkins and avocados are
4 and a half stars. Good job Lucie!
Words I learned from this book: trilobite, tamp, portière, retinue, tourniquet, venatic, syrinx, wold, castrato, sejant, besotted, seersucker, capuchin, grok, pram, vocable (n.), fetlock, hillock, neurasthenic, escutcheon, civet, natter, mummery, curlew, cortège, sacrarium, budgerigar, Hindemith, trammel, batiste, crinoline, Ashkenazi, abbatoir*, bitumen, bowered, physiognomy, dementia praecox, Trakl, barberry, coquettish, poplin, curry (v.), bower, odalisque, dirndl, boy-weed, excelsior, pinafore, linsey-woolsey, Bokhara, harrier, attar, sateen, ersatz, irides, conjunctivae, glossolalia.
*(sic - I wonder if it isn't her own modification of "abattoir," as flavored by either "abba" or "abbot.")
Also, kinds of berries that appear in this book: chinaberry, thimbleberry, barberry, raspberry (twice), lingonberry, black cherry*,
*not a berry? though who cares because strawberries aren't technically berries while pumpkins and avocados are
4 and a half stars. Good job Lucie!
January 1, 2014
Some of my favorite authors like Paul Auster, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon get so far out there that the narrative, plot, character development, message, storyline and what have you get lost. Either that or I am truly a dolt and miss the forest from the trees.
Unfortunately, when it came to this National Book Award nominee for poetry, one of those two things happened. My ego tells me to think it was the former and, thus, the poet's fault while my conscience tells me it is more likely the latter and, thus, my fault.
Yep. I should've paid more attention during the poetry section and lectures of Father Cicconolfi's English Lit. class at Gonzaga. I am confident the good Jesuit would not be pleased at me right now.
Would I recommend reading this book of poetry? Yes, of course, if you like a shot of truly imaginative work or magical realism. If you prefer your poetry a bit more "meat and potatoes" and nothing fancy, then you may want to take a pass on this one.
Sorry Ms. Lucie Brock-Broifo but I am just too damn dumb for your outstanding poetry.
Unfortunately, when it came to this National Book Award nominee for poetry, one of those two things happened. My ego tells me to think it was the former and, thus, the poet's fault while my conscience tells me it is more likely the latter and, thus, my fault.
Yep. I should've paid more attention during the poetry section and lectures of Father Cicconolfi's English Lit. class at Gonzaga. I am confident the good Jesuit would not be pleased at me right now.
Would I recommend reading this book of poetry? Yes, of course, if you like a shot of truly imaginative work or magical realism. If you prefer your poetry a bit more "meat and potatoes" and nothing fancy, then you may want to take a pass on this one.
Sorry Ms. Lucie Brock-Broifo but I am just too damn dumb for your outstanding poetry.
December 9, 2013
'The smaller the light to write to becomes, the more / I have to say to you.' 'Lie here with me in snow.' This collection feels heavy, winsome, intelligent, like a mosaic, sometimes incomprehensible - all of which are ok by me. There are more than a handful of poems here I look forward to returning to (especially 'For a Snow Leopard in October'). Also I think you'll have to agree that the author photo is nothing short of epic. Some themes: dead father, animals, darkness/light, middle of the country, found notes - each section seems to have recurring motifs, which make the collection even more interesting.
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