Broken World
Reviews

Bookslut.com , Dale Smith:
“Lease possesses an impressive genius for compressing subversive imagery and vocal cadences within dynamic rhetorical fields.”

Buffalo News:
“Visionary in its approach and stunning in its linguistic effect.”

Café Review:
“Joseph Lease is ‘one of our strongest contemporary political/experimental’ poets, as Thomas Fink writes, not because of his more overt political and social references, but because of his willingness to go within to ‘witness’ ‘what happened here—.’ . . . The paradoxical act of turning inward to connect with the outside world is the true political and poetic strength of the book.”

CutBank Reviews:
“A master of rich, arresting images, beautiful cadences, and an architect of formal beauty and experimentation, Lease gives us Broken World, an entirely necessary book.”

Denver Quarterly:
“Absorbing the nutrients of American Emersonian/Whitmanian/Dickinsonian tradition and recent poetic innovations, [Lease’s] lyricism evinces verbal subtlety and complexity at the same time as it conveys intensely enacted perception and abiding sincerity.”

Feminist Review:
“[Lease’s] poems announce what things are not, only to reconstruct the world with its pieces. . . . caus[ing] the reader to engage and read in a new way.”

Galatea Resurrects:
“An affirmative and visionary work.”

Interim:
“What is . . . most striking and brave about Broken World is Lease’s consummate attempt to reach out to other voices . . . The community of these voices splinters and reassembles out of fragments until the speaker of ‘Free Again’ admits ‘I have a gun in my head’—an image that summons Emily Dickinson and Kurt Cobain. Surrendering itself at moments to the surfacing interruptions of voices, ‘Free Again’ aligns itself in the ranks of deeply important books like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous . . . Again and again, as we read we find that there is renewal, that like Whitman, the poet can assert ‘there are millions of suns left,’ that clutter becomes ‘holy garbage’—that the project of America is equal parts beauty and devastation.”

Jacket:
“[Lease] shares [Amiri] Baraka’s ability to make an elegiac poem carry all the thematic force of a great novel.”

Oakland Tribune:
“[Lease’s] verse comprises views of America and its people, stark images of real folk.”

Octopus #09:
“Broken World is an astonishing book whose magic unfolds with each re-turning of the page. It is an inexhaustible energy source to savor and return to for hope and inspiration.”

Poetry Project Newsletter:
“A book of broken-off prayers appropriate to a broken world. . . . A tragicomic, oddly triumphant book of poetry that transforms even the darkest places of the American psyche into the placeholders for a missing, messianic light.”

Rain Taxi:
“A book as enjoyable for the speed with which one might move through it as it is for the deep, underlying intelligence that rewards multiple readings and the mulling over of its many pleasures.”

Santa Cruz Sentinel:
“An incisive look at the downside of being an American today.”

Third Factory:
“Dynamic, politically charged . . . A relevant lyrical (in parts elegiac) response to today.”

Verse:
“Broken World, sufficiently dappled with white spaces and room to reflect, lends itself to a reading in one sitting. Lease’s poems are as vulnerable as they are demanding, as tentative as they are assertive. He asks and tells, gropes and glues. . . . the reader finds him or herself digging through the contents of a man split open, spilling words.”

Kevin Killian:
"As a document of suffering and redemptive love, Broken World belongs in a long line of modernist texts, Zukofsky's "A," Crane's White Buildings, Reznikoff's Testimony. The long sequence ‘Free Again' has already made itself an essential event, thrillingly anthemic. The release of Broken World is one of the signal events in recent poetic history."

Laura Mullen:
"Exuberant, deft, gorgeously alive, and immensely complicated, these poems recognize our human freedoms and failures in fresh and important ways. Our new Whitman, Joseph Lease is interested both in our human rights and the question of what it is to be American, and he is searingly accurate about all that word now means. Broken World is intensely smart, exquisitely vulnerable, and completely original."

Marjorie Perloff:
"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!"

Donald Revell:
"Our poems, like ourselves, have become obsessed with security—and it is a backward obsession, a rage to keep the meanings out, to guard against the miraculous mishap of reading. How wonderful, then, to find myself in Lease's Broken World. Here, the doors have swung wide open; the white space welcomes wildness and hap. And best of all, the cadences, which are the rapt cadences of real awe, show that silence is not fearsome but a Friend. These poems are a new way of life."