Stay, Illusion

Starred review from August 26, 2013
Gorgeous and grim, elaborate yet forthright about the causes (and the effects) of its sadness, this fourth collection from Brock-Broido (Trouble in Mind) spins, drapes, and sculpts its virtuosic figures around the ideas and emotions of mourning. Often Brock-Broido commemorates her father, remembering him on his own, in her family, in conjunction with her own past selves: “If my own voice falters,” one poem begins, “tell them hubris was my way of adoring you.” (Her title quotes Hamlet, addressing his father’s ghost.) Long lines deliquesce; long titles and longer sentences mix ceremonial beauty with self-reproach, not only in the many poems that touch on the poet’s family but also in the standouts that remember other events, not least the executions of Tookie Williams and other victims of the American death penalty. Part tapestry, part astronomy, part dollhouse, the metaphorical verve that has made Brock-Broido influential—and sometimes controversial—remains abundant: Brock-Broido envisions herself once “In a poplin nightgown and my mallow-color shoes,// With all my lionlikes about me,” and again with “my own ivory hillocks, my toy/ Pram filled with slippery mice, my own mares fetlock-deep in squalls/ Of snow.” And yet—even more than in her previous book (which remembered her mother)—Brock-Broido can grow stark, unornamented, directly moving, too. A poem about a dying body asks, “Put your hands/ Into the sheets and tell me where the needles are,” and a fine elegy for the poet Liam Rector concludes, simply, “Would that our Liam were living still.”

September 15, 2013

The world created by Witter Bynner Prize winner Brock-Broido (Trouble in Mind) is elegant, self-contained, baroquely sensuous, and gaspingly, glazedly beautiful. It's also a tough world to enter, requiring fierce concentration as we step gingerly through seemingly disassociated lines: "If it is written down, you can't rescind it./ Spoon and potage bowl./ You are starving. Come closer." Once we arrive, we start seeing trouble, the gorgeousness edged by sadness, hunger, death: "The misfortunes of a saint condemned to turn great sorrows// into greater egrets, ice-bound and irrevocable." Even as Brock-Broido uses supreme magic to transform those sorrows, she reminds us of our physicality ("Your heart was a mess--// a mob of hoofprints"), our indifference ("How dare you come home from your factory/ ...weathered/ and incurious"), our neediness ("I miss your heart, my heart"), our dwelling in a world of "sooty basements of churches/ Full of persons wrapped in the coppery leather limbs of methadone" and "private gardens/...[where] the animals are harnessed in// Or bled out broad." VERDICT There's no easy escaping in these poems, and Brock-Broido makes us work for our pleasure, but many will start out doubters and end up converts. Grand for sophisticated readers.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2013
Brock-Broido (Trouble in Mind, 2004) fills the page with long, sweeping lines, taking all the space she needs for her motley cotillions of jostling and twirling ideas and images. Her counterintuitive word choices and usage, sneaky metaphors, and reeled-in-from-afar allusions all somersault through the mind, sparking, flashing, and snapping us awake to a fresh form of attention. In her fourth book, her hopscotch imagination induces us to contemplate what is seen and what is overlooked, what is felt and what is denied. With a fingertip, a raised eyebrow, the touch of a divining rod, a whirled cloak, Brock-Broido sets poems in motion about nature corralled, animals indentured and slaughtered, and melting arctic ice that strands polar bears. The poet sees the world whole and netted. In Heat, she links girls in Belarus to Oswald and the Kennedy assassination to the open-carry gun law in OklahomaI just feel more safe, said Joe Wood, cocked / Among the waffles and the syrups and the diners. Like Jorie Graham and Laurie Sheck, Brock-Broido is brainy, alluring, inventive, witty, and tough.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)