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.
(less)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
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Trouble in Mind | 
