My full review of Brock-Broido’s Stay, Illusion is now on Poetry Flash.
In her new book Stay, Illusion (Knopf, 2013), Brock-Broido’s gorgeous jottings, reveries on the human condition in the early 21st Century by a woman in mid-life––the poet seeks to find and offer to other solace in a heart-breaking world. Living as she does in a “single person tax-bracket of one alive,” the poet’s similes and metaphors tumble out in meditations on cruelty, fame, loneliness, insanity, and death. The poet takes solace and pleasure in the sensuous details of the moment––blue thistles on the road, the black flowerbed “sumptuous in emptiness”–– even as she scrapes and cracks against brute and brutal realities––“unspeakable anxiety” and what Helen Vendler once called “the dreadful given of life.”