Broken World

by Joseph Lease

With musical grace critics have likened to that of Robert Creeley, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams, Joseph Lease mixes a storyteller’s rhythm with lyric beauty to create a collection filled with humor, political bite, and psychological intensity. In a country where “money has won everywhere,” but the essential promise of democracy still beckons, these poems uncover our troubled psyches and show us what it might mean to be “Free Again.”

Genres: Poetry

70 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2007

About the author

Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011; Finalist, NCIBA Poetry Book of the Year Award), Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007), and Human Rights (Talisman House, second edition forthcoming). Lease’s poems “’Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” and "Send My Roots Rain" have been selected for Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was also selected for The Best American Poetry 2002.

Marjorie Perloff wrote: “The poems in Joseph Lease’s Broken World are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of AIDS or playing complex variations on Rilke’s Duino Elegies (“If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my / Lunch money”), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials. His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority: Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was—and how it is. An exquisite collection!”

Michael Bérubé called Broken World “remarkably inventive and evocative work from Joseph Lease, one of the finest poets writing today.”

Lease was born in Chicago, and attended Columbia University, Brown University, and Harvard University. He has received The Academy of American Poets Prize, The Henry Evans Fellowship in Poetry, and Fellowships and grants in poetry and poetics from Columbia University, Harvard University, Brown University, and California College of the Arts. He is a Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts and a member of the Advisory Board of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

Reviews

[Mark Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not a big poetry person -- much of it is usually a little too esoteric for me, with references to obscure Greek myths and Scandinavian heroes or, worse yet, Biblical allusions, which always just make me feel illiterate or evil -- with the Biblical stuff at least.

This book is down to earth. It's about real life, with real world phrases that can melt your heart or burn your brain. It's a little sad, though, conjuring the feeling of a desolate winter, wind howling over a gray landscape, someplace without trees, where it's hard to distinguish a horizon line.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Broken World begins with two elegiac poems--the second functioning almost explicitly as a eulogy--and Lease strips the language down to the bone. One can very much feel Robert Creeley's influence here, but Lease tends to go back to more prosaic in form as the lyrics go on and prose poems break up the rhythm. The effect is interesting and feels a bit like a fugue, but a passionate one, where one is grasping for a self, only to have decentered and deconstructed. These poems do go into both the personal and the political, blending the two while pointing out that assuming the two are identical is itself problematic. This rewards several re-readings.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lease’s “pieces of mirror sweep the word” and allow the reader to reflect on their situation as a self in American, personal and ancestral space.

Broken World is an astonishing book whose magic unfolds with each re-turning of the page. It is an inexhaustible energy source to savor and return to for hope and inspiration when faced by the fixed nature of America’s paved over interior and exterior landscapes. Lease grasps for other voices to chant and pray with the full potential of words and thoughts. He understands that “we need to know why voices fall apart—“ and offers that in these endeavors, “the readiness is all—“

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary book--lyrical, sprawling and energetic. Lease is in full command of his voice, and he's really doing something new and exciting with Broken World.
Both heartbroken and proud, Broken World is, in part, a journey through the hazy periphery of American identity. Busted systems and spiritual tangles abound, but the interior path of discovery is tough, resilient and not at all cynical or patronizing. Creeley and Williams are good launching points, but Lease's toolbox is overflowing and there's something more bohemian at work, too--a more immediate and conversational rhythm that brings a whole new energy to his work.

[John Isles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Broken World is one of the best books of poetry I have read in many years. A good many books these days are impressive in a technical sense but feel empty; Joseph Lease's book is technically brilliant, but it is also powerful stuff that speaks from the broken heart of our culture; it is smart--even hip--but it does the good, old fashioned work of emboldening the soul in a way that didn't seem possible before. Read it!

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishingly gorgeous, succinct, Joseph Lease's poems in Broken World are as beautiful as they are interested in beauty, and they are as reflective, critical, and revelatory of our times as they are equally hopeful of them. Joseph Lease is undoubtedly one of the most important poets of his generation.

[Patrick Duggan · Rating 5 out of 5]

(For the purposes of full disclosure, I have to admit this is a somewhat biased review, as Joseph Lease is a friend, and I myself had a hand in the pre-press copyediting. That being said--)

Broken World begins in a low tone, an easing of whispered language, reminiscent of James Schuyler or Robert Creeley (himself somewhat of a mentor to Lease.) That ease soon fades as we move into the title poem, a eulogy for Lease's friend James Assatly, who died of AIDS at a young age shortly after completing a novel which remains unpublished. By eulogizing his friend in verse, he also eulogizes a bygone America, a bygone hope, and a faltered national dream and identity.

In many ways, Broken World is about death, but it does not mourn, it is death as transformation, death as opportunity, death as rebirth and re-imagining (the refrain of Free Again builds this into a chorus, a raucous mercy meal for the departed.) The world and its norms are failing all around us, but once the soul leaves its body, the next body is waiting, there is new hope and new life, and a new will to fight for what is important. Nietsche thought we could form the world with our will, and so does Broken World. It is our prayer.

It is also identity -- Jewish identity, middle class identity, American identity, and the collective history and baggage that comes along with it. Lease moves through form and line, verse and prose, image and breath, approaching these weighty issues with ease and grace from so many angles -- this death becomes our history, our refrain. His politic is subtext, and the lack of a heavy handed overture is refreshing.

[anya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lease's "Broken World" expresses the horror of those of us who have chosen to look America in the face: throughout "Broken World," the collective "we" would shame America for her reliance on economic systems that destroy people's lives, or her faith in a progress that erases all which has come before it, etc.; however, for me, poems that only shame lose their desirability: instead, Lease's poems refuse to not hope, they beg and pray for saving. The paradox for the contemporary artist in today's world, with allusions to religious imperatives, is how to be in our world, but not of it. Specifically, "how should I be an American," who does not remember her past, whose present is also unknown or turned away from by most. And yet, how beautiful it is to be alive--the voice in Broken World says something like "I feel so lucky to have been apart of it". It speaks the emotions of the artist today--overjoyed to have been a part of life, which can be so high, and also art, which is always at its best--yet a great disparity is also present because the artist can no longer celebrate America, even when taking in her "soiled parts," as Whitman did: too many have been ruined, and not enough has been said.
So, this is what "Broken World" takes on. I think Lease is looking for redemption, as we all do; and through calculated, beautiful lines, he works it out.

[Trane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most amazing books of poetry I've read in ages. Inspiring, beautiful, and angry — always ready to take language where it needs to go in order to rend the commonplace into something new. "Broken World (for James Assatly)" holds a lyrical sadness that is so crystalline and pure that it's amazing that it can hold itself together despite the force of rage that shoots through it:

"Arrows on water;

You are with me —
rain on snow —

and I shatter
everyone who

hates you."

The crux of this book, however, is the incredible serial poem "Free Again." Reading "Free Again" is like reading the visionary rage of Whitman and Ginsberg as channeled through the dialectical mind of Theodor Adorno. Except it's like doing this while standing in a dimly lit 7-11 parking lot and hoping that the apocalypse doesn't come while you've got a cheap doughnut and sour coffee in hand, all the while knowing that the apocalypse is already here and there's nowhere to go except straight into it. I'd call it a "Howl" for the 21st century if it didn't deserve far more intelligent praise than a cliché like that. (Which perhaps, and in many ways, might not be such a cliché at all.)

[Joshua moses · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over the past year or so I have read two books of contemporary poetry that strike me as indispensable: Joseph Lease's "Broken World" and Alice Notley's "In the Pines". I mention them together because they seem to be engaged in somewhat similar projects--expansive political poetics incorporating the lyric, popular culture, critiques of capitalism, domination and authoritarianism in its multiple forms. Yet maintaining a sense of tragic humor, giving them a buoyant quality, saving them from the didactic quality of much "political" poetry. "Broken World" draws on the best of dissident American late modernist tradition: I read hints of George Oppen, Robert Creeley and some of the New York School. But Lease is definitely his own man and his lyrical intensity has few peers in contemporary American poetry. All without being pedantic and polemical. I have probably read the book 20 times and though Lease comes close to despair, "Broken World" continues to sing with hard-won defiant hope. A withstanding decency.

[Statmanm · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fine and beautiful collection of poetry. Lease has a keen ear, a better eye. I'm challenged as a reader into thinking about language and line, yes, but also importantly about how the world is and could be. It's a quality too many poets whose work I think about don't think about enough. It's part of a 5+ feeling I have (five stars feels inadequate). In all, I feel fortunate to have this book in my library and in the world.

[Addie · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a beautiful anger in Lease's poems, which provide a kind of elegy for a fallen America. The poems are lyrical, yet tough-minded; emotional, but clear-eyed. The volume is an exhilarating read, and Lease, in the end, proves a master of the long poem. It's good to see (and hear) poetry with such a political edge.

[David Kaufmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are parts of this book I wish I had written. Covetousness might be the highest form of praise:

If I cried out,
Who among the angelic orders would
Slap my face, who would steal my
Lunch money, knock me
Down—sailboats moored
In harbor, trees on the long
Breakwater, orange shimmer
Of late July evening—I can’t stop
Wanting the voice that will come—

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a kind of irony I can get behind -- a multiplicity of meanings, a complexity of utterance, a complicity, a critique. I prefer the second half, all poems called "Free Again."
"We are ourselves because this is the world's first morning, and we are ourselves because it is not, and we are also not ourselves."

[Joe Amato]

Affective, spiritually-driven, conceptually-charged writing that probes the fractures and continuities linking exteriors to interiors, public worlds to private lives, and asks us to reimagine the tone and tenor of our responses and responsibilities.

[William Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joseph Lease is one of the best writers in the US today. Broken World is a gorgeous, lyrical, socially conscious, important book for our times.

[Dajoshap · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lease's book: shattered and shattering, as Delaunay kept reiterating at the beginning of the last century, like the fruit-dish of Cezanne.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Bay Area poet has created a form of the long poem that is poetry, performance, and political commentary that maintians sweep and lyric.

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

At a time when a lot of poets are into an aesthetic that's too cool for politics, Lease is a responsible reminder of the true duties of what it means to be an artist-citizen.

[Afcobb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Certainly one of the best new poetry collections I've read in quite some time. Lease's voice is assured, original and breathtakingly poignant. Highly recommended.

[Mia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When we're gone, our names will mean green body. When we're gone, our names will mean green thought."
Why are his poems unlike anyone else's poems?
Why are they happily killing me?

[Monica Drake · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was lucky to hear this author read in an small, upstairs space in a corner of Chicago. I bought the book immediately. It's smart, interesting, arresting.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Broken World, I'm not sure whether I have missed the mark, or Joseph Lease has missed the mark. It is evident that Lease is saying something, but he is not saying enough (as in "Broken World"). It is evident that Lease is writing in a form that is a departure from traditional poetic forms, but it is not enough of a departure (as in "Prayer, Broken Off"). We, the readers, can see on the horizon the potential of Lease's poetry, and seeing that potential we feel disappointed that Lease has not reached that potential, has not brought us to the promised destination. The "Simon says" motif doesn't work; it isn't clever enough to work on its own, and yet Lease leaves it to its own devices like an infant unattended (as in "Little Lightning Bolt" and "Prayer, Broken Off"). The poems that have garnered comparison to Robert Creeley, are a pale shadow - whereas Creeley says a lot with a little, Lease says a little with a little (as in "Ghosts"). I think a closer comparison would be George Saunders (even though he is not, to my knowledge, a poet). Overall, I'm disappointed...

To be a man, to be, to try. I hate the word man. I'm not crazy about the word husband or the word father either. To try. To heal the night or day. I'm busy selling fighters and bombers. The NASDAQ moves in my face. I'm wired to my greasy self-portrait. Every day in every way. America equals ghost. The wrong side of history. Flat matted yellow weeds. Who could believe "God chose me." Flat matted yellow weeds. God chose? You were dying that spring. Reading at some college I saw ROTC boys in fatigue. The talkiness of winter unwraps me now. In each room someone is fingering her or his soul. The talkiness of winter unwraps me now. The garden made unknowing by the snow. Erased by snow. Erased by snow. Two blocks from campus, a boy, maybe ten or eleven, yelled at a junior-high-school girl: "Ho-bag, incest baby, spread your legs." It's all naked out here. Nothing is here. It's all one big strip mall. We have a Ponderosa.

- Broken World (2), pg. 15

*

a strain of faded

storm light in my hand -

If I cried out,
Who among the angelic orders would
Slap my face, who would steal my
Lunch money, knock me
Down - sailboats moored
In harbor, trees on the long
Breakwater, orange shimmer
Of late July evening - I can't stop
Wanting the voice that will come -

- Prayer, Broken Off (1), pg. 31

*

Simon says, put your hands on your head. Simon says, put your finger on your nose. Simon says, you haven't done enough. Simon says, you don't care enough. Simon says, compulsive old answers can't leave the world alone. Simon says, you're going to die. Simon says, don't let yourself care. Simon says, you can't stop caring. Simon says, man-tall but thin as a phone call, compulsive old answers can't leave the world alone. Simon says, you only have blood, marsh light, and sparrow. Simon says, put your hands on your head -

- Little Lightning Bolt, pg. 24

*

Simon says, put your hands on your
head, Simon says, put your finger on your
nose, Simon says you haven't done enough,
Simon says you don't care enough, Simon
says, you can't stop caring -

[...]

- Prayer, Broken Off (2), pg. 32

*

the word for dawn
 is other

the word for light
 is freefall

the word for hand
 is other

the word for dawn
 is sister

her weeds
 her bridge

her clay-blue sky her wind
 and rain her friends

her house
 her stream

of ghosts
 her horses

were her beauty
 her horses

her stories
 the word for dawn

is others
 the word for light

 is nothing
- Ghosts, pg. 11-12

[Seth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Broken World is stunning and unforgettable.
It might be a Broken World, but the heart of our healing is found in these pages.

[J.C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beyond me.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Lease's article "progressive lit," while looking for possibilities for the lyric "I," he points the the poetry of Amiri Baraka. Baraka, in Lease's view, is a poet whose "I" contains multiple voices, whose "I" reaches toward the societal "we," opening the space for meaningful political poetry.

If Lease's article shows him championing the possibilities of the lyric "I" through a critical mode, then Broken World shows his ongoing demonstration of everything that is possible for the lyric "I" today.

Lease's poetry ranges from the luminous abstraction of "Cy Twombly" to the breathtaking elegy of "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" to the rhythmically driving long poem "Free Again," a poem that itself skillfully holds close a wide range of precedents (from Ginsberg's "America" to William's Spring and All to Shaprio's "A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel").

Let me highlight a section from "Free Again" (be aware that the formatting here differs from the original:

 my handwriting, stories, Paul
 Celan, phrases--

on the back of
 a recipt--
 somewhere

I made
 the words--angry
 enough--  pit-- 

hot--pit-- 
 our
 cheap history
 keeps smiling--

 "you've been disliked 
 for three thousand years:
 do you ever look in the mirror--"

At a time where experimental poetry is filled with platitudes about how laguage is non-referential, Lease pulls us from that solipsism brings us back to Paul Celan, whose experimentations and deformations of the German language were born out of a need to respond the the societal trauma of the Holocaust.

Only an "I" that can fracture, that can emote, that can hold multiplicities within it will be able to respond to the horrors of the twentieth century and the lived experience of the twenty-first century (lived both as an individual and as a citizen). This poetry is tough. This poetry is tender. This poetry meets the demands of a harsh but beautiful world.

[Oscar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely lives up to the title.

In live readings, Joseph Lease's Broken World comes across as Walt Whitman's voice echoing from his grave to comment on the current US condition. In the text, it's that accompanied with a youthful, childlike second voice reminiscing on lost America as reconciliation becomes the central theme.

Must read through this again to see what else holds together Lease's beautifully fragmented language.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

And the hype machine rolls along...

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it.

[Michael Bérubé · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkably inventive and evocative work from Joseph Lease, one of the finest poets writing today.