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Human Rights
Book by Lease, Joseph
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
1 person is currently reading
59 people want to read
About the author
Joseph Lease
15 books55 followersJoseph 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 24, 2008
Don't let the four-star ranking fool you... the only reason that this is not a five is that I am not qualified to make such a claim. This work is (in my mind) worth five stars, but inasmuch as I am not aware of poetry, I felt that making a five-star claim might be presumptuous.
April 10, 2021
Revised opinion after 17 years of appreciating his work and 10 years of rereading this particular little collection: 5 stars. Joseph Lease is a treasure.
favorite poems: Michael Kohlhaas, Words Like Rain, The Room
favorite bit:
...
To forget to have a "personal life."
To unnerve animals.
To wander in a drowse.
To stand in icy water.
To believe in words.
To believe in words spoken
by an angel;
To worry about the angel's
intentions. To open
smoothly, like a hand.
favorite poems: Michael Kohlhaas, Words Like Rain, The Room
favorite bit:
...
To forget to have a "personal life."
To unnerve animals.
To wander in a drowse.
To stand in icy water.
To believe in words.
To believe in words spoken
by an angel;
To worry about the angel's
intentions. To open
smoothly, like a hand.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews