Lucie Brock-Broido's 2013 collection, Stay, Illusion: Poems, was a finalist for the National Book Award. In an interview, she said of poetry: "It’s not a thing that blooms; it’s a thing that wounds," and her poems keep you on their toes with their shifting syntax and diction. They demand close attention and are often difficult reads in the best of ways: their ideas and images force themselves into your consciousness and then, your memory. More on Brock-Broido here.
You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World.
by Lucie Brock-Broido
Tell the truth I told me When I couldn’t speak.
Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship Or a child
Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer
In the 1930s Toward the iron lung of polio.
According to the census I am unmarried And unchurched.
The woman in the field dressed only in the sun.
Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful
Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of ice.
I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible.
For whom left am I first?
We have come to terms with our Self
Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.
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