Trouble in Mind

WithTrouble in Mind,her long-awaited third collection, Lucie Brock-Broido has written her most exceptional poems to date. There is a new clarity to her work, a disquieting transparency, even in the midst of the wild thickets of language for which she is known. A poet "at the border of her own allegory," Brock-Broido searches for a lexicon adequate to the extremities of experiencea quest that is as capricious as it is uncompromising. In the process, she reveals, unsparingly, things as they are. In "Pamphlet on Ravening" she recalls, "I was a hunger artist once, as well. / My bones had shone. / I had had rapture on my side."The bookis laced with sequences: haunted, odd self-portraits; a succession of poems provoked by discarded titles by Wallace Stevens; an intermittent series of fractured and beguiling lyrics that she variously refers to as fragments, leaflets, and apologues. Trouble in Mindis a book that astonishes us afresh at the agility and the uncanny will of language, which Brock-Broido is not afraid to follow where it may lead her: "That the name of bliss is only in the diminishing / (As far as possible) of pain. That I had quit / The quiet velvet cult of it, / Yet trouble came." Even trouble, in Brock-Broido's idiom, becomes something resplendent. From the Hardcover edition.

Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of two previous collections of poetry, A Hunger and The Master Letters. She is Director of Poetry in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and has taught previously at Harvard University, the Bennington Writing Seminars, and Princeton University. She has been the recipient of awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


From the Hardcover edition.