In on the Great Joke

by Laura Broadbent

What do you get when you cross Lao Tzu and an application for a university teaching gig? What do you get when you give W. G. Sebald and Clarice Lispector the ability to speak from the afterlife? What happens if a girl is stopped at a red light for an entire year? In on the Great Joke is a palace of hybridity, where film structure informs poetry, poetry alters the essay, the essay recalibrates the joke. Broadbent has lent her ear to the dead, the living, the voiceless, to give us the punchline of what it means to be intellectually alive. Laura Broadbent is the author of Oh There You Are I Can't See You Is It Raining? , which won the 2012 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She lives in Montreal, Queceb, where she is working on her PhD in Literature.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2016

About the author

Laura Broadbent was raised in Stratford, Ontario and has resided in Montreal since 2005. Her first book of poetry Oh There You Are I Can't See You Is It Raining? (Snare Books, 2012) won the 2012 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She was recently appointed the reviews editor at Lemon Hound, and will begin her PhD in 2013.

Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It Raining? has been eloquently described as “an experiment in hybrid and versatility of voice, these texts stutter around the slipperiness of language and the transience of desire.” Broadbent’s writing does indeed come across as an experiment bent on breaking down proverbial gender stereotypes and giving new meaning to relationships, love and romantic desire in terms of each being essential, absurd, random, hideous, and blind.

Reviews

[Alex Prong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura has a brilliant mind and, as the title suggests, a great sense of humour. I’m sure I will read this again someday

[b · Rating 5 out of 5]

A: Taotaoist