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The Broken Night
In The Broken Night , poet Bruce Wasserman explores touchpoints of the little known and the unknown in conversations with the dead and a roll call of the living, to squeeze out the vibrant essence found within every word. A literary critic for the New York Journal of Books, Wasserman presents a mix of long-a 20-page poem in 13 parts-and shorter format poems ranging from such topics as delivering a breech calf by moonlight in remote rural Minnesota to factory farmed chicken eggs and the consequences for the chickens, from an esoteric view of a 1934 Farmall tractor to an elegy inspired by drifting snowflakes, from wartime dentistry on the front lines in a tent clinic to his grandmother's Yiddish sayings with an application for every aspect of life.
"In the book's elegant long poem... Wasserman uses rich musical pacing to weave in different historical contexts, and thus creates for us a poem that is complex, beautiful and heartbreaking3/4as is this entire book. It celebrates and grieves, and makes space for the reader to experience mystery and awe. 'When good luck comes, ' the poet's grandmother says in Yiddish, 'pull up a chair for it.' This book is our good luck, so pull up a chair and read," says Betsy Sholl, author of House of Sparrows , Otherwise Unseeable , Rough Cradle and Late Psalm . "Bruce Arlen Wasserman's poems speculate into other times and other lives with sagacity and cleareyed...optimism, we'll call it, though they recognize the difficulties and horrors, too. His is a hard-won faith earned in the trenches and on the fences, juxtaposing the bucolic and the pop cultural and the family historical toward beauty, reconciliation, and illumination," says Patrick Madden, author of Disparates , Sublime Physick and Quotidiana.
With an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Wasserman's writing has been published in the Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, The River Heron Review, Kindred Literary Magazine, the Broad River Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, High Shelf Literary Magazine, Wild Roof Journal and the Washington Independent Review of Books . He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was a semi-finalist for the Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers, a semi-finalist for the Proverse Prize and won the Anna Davidson Rosenberg 2019 Poetry Award .
"We see the personal become universal," says Richard Jackson, author of Where the Wind Comes From and Broken Horizons , "as we begin to participate in each turn of phrase which is also a turn to a new perception. 'Life is a series / of patches, sometimes / held tight with glue / other times with stitches / faint traces, even / a single thread, ' and the single thread here is a strong voice that is empathetic as it reaches across time in the tour de force poem, "A Loss of Terms" that climaxes this terrific book. From farm life to army life to the cosmos Wasserman takes us on a journey that is as unique as it is important."
"In the book's elegant long poem... Wasserman uses rich musical pacing to weave in different historical contexts, and thus creates for us a poem that is complex, beautiful and heartbreaking3/4as is this entire book. It celebrates and grieves, and makes space for the reader to experience mystery and awe. 'When good luck comes, ' the poet's grandmother says in Yiddish, 'pull up a chair for it.' This book is our good luck, so pull up a chair and read," says Betsy Sholl, author of House of Sparrows , Otherwise Unseeable , Rough Cradle and Late Psalm . "Bruce Arlen Wasserman's poems speculate into other times and other lives with sagacity and cleareyed...optimism, we'll call it, though they recognize the difficulties and horrors, too. His is a hard-won faith earned in the trenches and on the fences, juxtaposing the bucolic and the pop cultural and the family historical toward beauty, reconciliation, and illumination," says Patrick Madden, author of Disparates , Sublime Physick and Quotidiana.
With an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Wasserman's writing has been published in the Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, The River Heron Review, Kindred Literary Magazine, the Broad River Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, High Shelf Literary Magazine, Wild Roof Journal and the Washington Independent Review of Books . He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was a semi-finalist for the Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers, a semi-finalist for the Proverse Prize and won the Anna Davidson Rosenberg 2019 Poetry Award .
"We see the personal become universal," says Richard Jackson, author of Where the Wind Comes From and Broken Horizons , "as we begin to participate in each turn of phrase which is also a turn to a new perception. 'Life is a series / of patches, sometimes / held tight with glue / other times with stitches / faint traces, even / a single thread, ' and the single thread here is a strong voice that is empathetic as it reaches across time in the tour de force poem, "A Loss of Terms" that climaxes this terrific book. From farm life to army life to the cosmos Wasserman takes us on a journey that is as unique as it is important."
46 pages, Paperback
Published July 15, 2022
1372 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Arlen Wasserman
3 books24 followersBruce Arlen Wasserman assembled his first poetry manuscript with a typewriter on the kitchen table when he was seventeen. “The free verse of that work used rhythm to portray a harsh-edged city contrasted with the soft, lush features of natural elements,” he says. As a young man, he farmed and worked as a blacksmith in northern Minnesota, building his own blacksmith shop from the ground up using sawmill slabs and discarded poles. He drove a tractor-trailer in college, edited professional journals, wrote as a freelance journalist and is a dentist. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was a semi-finalist for the Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers, a semi-finalist for the Proverse Prize and won the Anna Davidson Rosenberg 2019 Poetry Award. His fiction manuscript, The Aroma of Light, was a finalist with LSU Press.
Bruce received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is a literary critic for the New York Journal of Books and his writing has been published in the Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, The River Heron Review, Kindred Literary Magazine, Broad River Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, High Shelf Literary Magazine, Washington Independent Review of Books and Wild Roof Journal. He has produced poetry shows to raise funds for nonprofits in Colorado and Wyoming. Beyond writing, Bruce creates visual art as a potter at Bruce Arlen Wasserman Studio, where he draws from a reservoir of poetry and his experience in working iron and wood, correlating a continued exploration of language, function and esoteric form.
Bruce received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is a literary critic for the New York Journal of Books and his writing has been published in the Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, The River Heron Review, Kindred Literary Magazine, Broad River Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, High Shelf Literary Magazine, Washington Independent Review of Books and Wild Roof Journal. He has produced poetry shows to raise funds for nonprofits in Colorado and Wyoming. Beyond writing, Bruce creates visual art as a potter at Bruce Arlen Wasserman Studio, where he draws from a reservoir of poetry and his experience in working iron and wood, correlating a continued exploration of language, function and esoteric form.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 12, 2022
I image that all poetry impacts breathing in some way. The reading of it aloud, the connection to emotion, the respite from external stimuli. And, I expect that much of this impact is unconscious, at least, most often, it is for me. This was not the case as I read, The Broken Night, by Bruce Arlen Wasserman (Finishing Line Press June 2022.) Wasserman’s book is an elegy to his father and, I assert, a treatise on the connection between breath and being. An extension or expression of the work of Bachelard, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Silence. Inhalation. Exhalation. Being. In which I was aware from the start.
Farmall F-12
It was all rusted iron and grinding gears
the 12 in its name standing for 12 horses
though I doubted, at 19 years, I could handle
12 breathing ones, 6 doubletrees and all those
leather-long reins gathered to two hands
at 3 miles-an-hour but the F-12 did 6 when
minted in ‘36, a year you could still buy rubber
when my father was 15, yet by ‘43 he was 22
wearing lieutenant’s bars and hoping for overseas
though he shipped to Texas and thought to ride
a horse …..
I could spend this space discussing his use of poetic techniques to create the presence of breath, the rush, and Wasserman has these skillsets, but I know Bruce a bit and got to know him further when I interviewed him for this article which leaves me inclined to blame it on a proven desire to break barriers in the quest to express and address the human experience. Bruce, a dentist, a blues vocalist, a song writer, and musician (harmonica and guitar,) a wilderness survivalist, a husband, a Jew, the list goes on, pulls from the extremes of these pursuits to express the awe, devotion, and devastation that encompassed the life Albert Wasserman: Role model. Trailblazer. Ever-present friend.
A Cow and A Calf and…
But this… this head-in, tail-out
asswords rotated transfixation
of new calf would never work
and so the neighbor brought
some specialist, sad sack that he was,
his arm all-the-way-to-the-shoulder
in hot, sticky birth canal, all the while
grumbling about the life he couldn’t
wait to leave, and struggling to turn
that first calf before birthing stillborn.
While Elsie, standing calm,
somehow sensed all that pushing
—five fingers twisting fetus
and wrenching womb—
would eventually work.
And faith, I figured as
not just for farmers
praying for rain, hoping
for healed land and cattle or yield
to pay the banker one more season—
faith, I figured, is far from fact.
It’s a heifer,
heaving every load of life,
trusting every drop of blood
to strange hands,
as the moon arranges
shadows on the ground
and things work out
beyond all control.
Somehow, I’m left with my lack of ability to express how this book will impact you as a reader, but it will. That is to say that if you have ever been around a campfire where everyone is a friend and taken a moment to take it all in, the lift of smoke on the air which blends into the purple dusk, the crack and timbre of laughter, boots on, boots off, the zip of nylon, the passing of a bottle, the first June Bug. Being. Inhale. Exhale. Again.
Today the Sun Shined Black
I was surprised at the finish that your body wasn’t nervous,
that your spirit breathed uninterrupted beauty
as you followed me, just like you always have, each footfall
leaving one last print in the snow, each pause as casual
as any other day, for assessment of the view, the mountains
you would never see again, the finding of the last few blades of green
before our two souls locked together, my hand on your nose…
Farmall F-12
It was all rusted iron and grinding gears
the 12 in its name standing for 12 horses
though I doubted, at 19 years, I could handle
12 breathing ones, 6 doubletrees and all those
leather-long reins gathered to two hands
at 3 miles-an-hour but the F-12 did 6 when
minted in ‘36, a year you could still buy rubber
when my father was 15, yet by ‘43 he was 22
wearing lieutenant’s bars and hoping for overseas
though he shipped to Texas and thought to ride
a horse …..
I could spend this space discussing his use of poetic techniques to create the presence of breath, the rush, and Wasserman has these skillsets, but I know Bruce a bit and got to know him further when I interviewed him for this article which leaves me inclined to blame it on a proven desire to break barriers in the quest to express and address the human experience. Bruce, a dentist, a blues vocalist, a song writer, and musician (harmonica and guitar,) a wilderness survivalist, a husband, a Jew, the list goes on, pulls from the extremes of these pursuits to express the awe, devotion, and devastation that encompassed the life Albert Wasserman: Role model. Trailblazer. Ever-present friend.
A Cow and A Calf and…
But this… this head-in, tail-out
asswords rotated transfixation
of new calf would never work
and so the neighbor brought
some specialist, sad sack that he was,
his arm all-the-way-to-the-shoulder
in hot, sticky birth canal, all the while
grumbling about the life he couldn’t
wait to leave, and struggling to turn
that first calf before birthing stillborn.
While Elsie, standing calm,
somehow sensed all that pushing
—five fingers twisting fetus
and wrenching womb—
would eventually work.
And faith, I figured as
not just for farmers
praying for rain, hoping
for healed land and cattle or yield
to pay the banker one more season—
faith, I figured, is far from fact.
It’s a heifer,
heaving every load of life,
trusting every drop of blood
to strange hands,
as the moon arranges
shadows on the ground
and things work out
beyond all control.
Somehow, I’m left with my lack of ability to express how this book will impact you as a reader, but it will. That is to say that if you have ever been around a campfire where everyone is a friend and taken a moment to take it all in, the lift of smoke on the air which blends into the purple dusk, the crack and timbre of laughter, boots on, boots off, the zip of nylon, the passing of a bottle, the first June Bug. Being. Inhale. Exhale. Again.
Today the Sun Shined Black
I was surprised at the finish that your body wasn’t nervous,
that your spirit breathed uninterrupted beauty
as you followed me, just like you always have, each footfall
leaving one last print in the snow, each pause as casual
as any other day, for assessment of the view, the mountains
you would never see again, the finding of the last few blades of green
before our two souls locked together, my hand on your nose…
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 7, 2022
As this is my own book, here is what other reviewers have said:
In The Broken Night Bruce Wasserman performs the poet’s task of breaking bread with the dead. In the book’s elegant long poem, he traces his father’s life, from Abraham to Al, from anti-Semitism to dentistry on World War II’s front lines, then a full life back in mid-century America with all its pleasures and unrest. Wasserman uses rich musical pacing to weave in different historical contexts, and thus creates for us a poem that is complex, beautiful and heartbreakingas is this entire book. It celebrates and grieves, and makes space for the reader to experience mystery and awe. “When good luck comes, the poet’s grandmother says in Yiddish, “pull up a chair for it.” This book is our good luck, so pull up a chair and read. ~Betsy Sholl, Author of House of Sparrows, Otherwise Unseeable, Rough Cradle and Late Psalm
Bruce Arlen Wasserman’s poems speculate into other times and other lives with sagacity and cleareyed…optimism, we’ll call it, though they recognize the difficulties and horrors, too. His is a hard-won faith earned in the trenches and on the fences, juxtaposing the bucolic and the pop cultural and the family historical toward beauty, reconciliation, and illumination. ~Patrick Madden, Author of Disparates, Sublime Physick and Quotidiana
“The universe tilted a little to the left when I awoke,” Bruce Wasserman begins one poem, but in fact all these poems reveal the tilted universe of a unique and important vision. Here we follow the poet’s own past stretching from his father’s to his own everyday experiences made almost visionary yet firmly rooted in the real world and its language. In other words we see the personal become universal as we begin to participate in each turn of phrase which is also a turn to a new perception. “Life is a series / of patches, sometimes / held tight with glue / other times with stitches / faint traces, even / a single thread,” and the single thread here is a strong voice that is empathetic as it reaches across time in the tour de force poem, “A Loss of Terms” that climaxes this terrific book. From farm life to army life to the cosmos Wasserman takes us on a journey that is as unique as it is important.~Richard Jackson, Author of Where the Wind Comes From and Broken Horizons
In The Broken Night Bruce Wasserman performs the poet’s task of breaking bread with the dead. In the book’s elegant long poem, he traces his father’s life, from Abraham to Al, from anti-Semitism to dentistry on World War II’s front lines, then a full life back in mid-century America with all its pleasures and unrest. Wasserman uses rich musical pacing to weave in different historical contexts, and thus creates for us a poem that is complex, beautiful and heartbreakingas is this entire book. It celebrates and grieves, and makes space for the reader to experience mystery and awe. “When good luck comes, the poet’s grandmother says in Yiddish, “pull up a chair for it.” This book is our good luck, so pull up a chair and read. ~Betsy Sholl, Author of House of Sparrows, Otherwise Unseeable, Rough Cradle and Late Psalm
Bruce Arlen Wasserman’s poems speculate into other times and other lives with sagacity and cleareyed…optimism, we’ll call it, though they recognize the difficulties and horrors, too. His is a hard-won faith earned in the trenches and on the fences, juxtaposing the bucolic and the pop cultural and the family historical toward beauty, reconciliation, and illumination. ~Patrick Madden, Author of Disparates, Sublime Physick and Quotidiana
“The universe tilted a little to the left when I awoke,” Bruce Wasserman begins one poem, but in fact all these poems reveal the tilted universe of a unique and important vision. Here we follow the poet’s own past stretching from his father’s to his own everyday experiences made almost visionary yet firmly rooted in the real world and its language. In other words we see the personal become universal as we begin to participate in each turn of phrase which is also a turn to a new perception. “Life is a series / of patches, sometimes / held tight with glue / other times with stitches / faint traces, even / a single thread,” and the single thread here is a strong voice that is empathetic as it reaches across time in the tour de force poem, “A Loss of Terms” that climaxes this terrific book. From farm life to army life to the cosmos Wasserman takes us on a journey that is as unique as it is important.~Richard Jackson, Author of Where the Wind Comes From and Broken Horizons
September 25, 2022
Bruce does it again. I almost hate reading this during the summer. I felt as if I should be wrapped in a blanket in front of a fire. Bruce takes you on a journey through time and emotions. I want to say how I felt during certain poems but I would feel like I’m spoiling it. I read one a few days after helping a friend with her horses and it literally made me tear up. Thank you.
Read
October 15, 2022Among the most beautiful and dedicated of elegies and poems of pure endurance, The Broken Night, not only offers senses of closure, but the continuance of life. Bruce Wasserman’s poems mend the broken. I love it and its inviting cover art; I will return to it often.
–Amber Rose Crowtree, author of poems, The Inviolable Hours, (FLP), 2021.
–Amber Rose Crowtree, author of poems, The Inviolable Hours, (FLP), 2021.
November 9, 2022
In this rich and beautifully rendered collection, Wasserman communes with both the living and the dead as he explores the intersection of work, place, heritage, culture, and identity. In other words, this book is a powerful testament to what it means to be human, in all its complexity, in all its joy.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews