A Little Middle of the Night

The language of Molly Brodakrs"s first full-length collection,A Little Middle of the Night, is ever shifting, brightly sonic, and disarming while exploring the margin between nature and art, darkness and beauty, dreams and awakenings. As echoed in one epigraph from Emerson, these poems capture "the Exact and the Vast" of consciousness in intense lyric verse with an angular and almost scientific sensitivity. Here is a speaker intent on discovery: "Oh whole world, we choose / another." This award-winning collection simmers with wit as Brodak confronts tragedy, childhood losses, transcendent love, and the question of art itself. Tinged with a suffering-"I was the littlest wastebasket. / I was my own church. Except- / scared, scared"-that rises above personal sorrow, her fierce and painterly poems redefine nature and art and what exists between: "Lately, there is spangled shade in my space / and a cold apple orchard to tend in place of consciousness." As Reginald Shepherd said about the poems in Brodakrs"s first collection, the chapbook Instructions for a Painting, her world is "ls"small enough / to sing in all directions,rs" and large enough to take us there."

Michigan-born Molly Brodak currently lives in Augusta, Georgia, where she is a lecturer in English and humanities at Augusta State University. Her work has appeared in the Colorado Review, FIELD, Ninth Letter, the Journal, the Northwest Review, the Laurel Review, the New Orleans Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Instructions for a Painting was chosen by Reginald Shepherd for the 2007 GreenTower Press Midwest Chapbook Series.