Trouble in Mind - Softcover

Brock-Broido, Lucie

  • 4.32 out of 5 stars
    284 ratings by Goodreads
 
9780375710223: Trouble in Mind
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0375710221 ISBN 13: 9780375710223
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2005

Synopsis

With Trouble 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 experience–a 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 book is 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 Mind is 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.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

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 Back Cover

With "Trouble 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 experience-a 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 book" is 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 Mind is 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.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date
2005
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0375710221
ISBN 13 
9780375710223
Binding
Paperback
Number of pages
88
Rating
  • 4.32 out of 5 stars
    284 ratings by Goodreads

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9781400040834: Trouble in Mind: Poems

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  1400040833 ISBN 13:  9781400040834
Publisher: Knopf, 2004
Hardcover