Poetry. The third book of poetry from Joseph Lease, BROKEN WORLD divides into two sections: the first is passionate and prayer-like; the second, a single poem "Free Again," contains 26 sections, each of the same title. "Exuberant, deft, gorgeously alive, and immensely complicated, these poems recognize our human freedoms and failures in fresh and important ways. 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"—Laura Mullen. "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.
Author City: Oakland, CA USA
Joseph Lease’s critically acclaimed books of poetry include TESTIFY (Coffee House Press, 2011), BROKEN WORLD (Coffee House Press, 2007), and Human Rights (Zoland Books, 2000). His poem “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly) ” was selected for The Best American Poetry 2002 (Scribner), edited by Robert Creeley and David Lehman. His poems have also been featured on NPR and published in The AGNI 30th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, BAY POETICS, NO GENDER, DENVER QUARTERLY, Colorado Review, FENCE, Paris Review, TALISMAN, and elsewhere. Originally from Chicago, Lease lives in the Bay Area and chairs the MFA Program in Writing at California College of Arts in San Francisco.
Reviews and Other Links
Ron Silliman
Aaron Kiely @ H_NGM_N
Noah Eli Gordon @ Rain Taxi
Andrew Joron @ Galatea Resurrects
John Chávez @ EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts
Dale Smith @ Bookslut
Michael Sikkema @ CutBank
Brian Strang @ Galatea Resurrects
Standard Schaefer @ Jacket