Trouble in Mind

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 bookis 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.