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Broken World
Poems by Joseph Lease
"The poems in Joseph Lease's Broken World are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of aids or playing complex variations on Rilke's Duino Elegies (‘If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my / Lunch money'), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials. His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority: Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was—and how it is. An exquisite collection!"—Marjorie Perloff
In Broken World, Joseph Lease takes us on a journey through America—wealthy and impoverished, raging and aloof, strong and vulnerable—exposing the raw core of American life and probing issues of national security and insecurity. With the magnetism of a gifted storyteller and the musicality of our best poets, Lease reveals what it might mean to be "Free Again" in a country where "money has won everywhere," but the essential promise of democracy still beckons. |
