Broken World

With musical grace critics have likened to that of Robert Creeley, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams, Joseph Lease mixes a storyteller’s rhythm with lyric beauty to create a collection filled with humor, political bite, and psychological intensity. In a country where “money has won everywhere,” but the essential promise of democracy still beckons, these poems uncover our troubled psyches and show us what it might mean to be “Free Again.”

Publication date: April 1, 2007

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 70 pages

ISBN: 9781566891981

Joseph Lease is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry: Testify, Broken World, Human Rights, and The Room. His poems have also been featured on NPR and published in Bay Poetics, The AGNI 30th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, VQR, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Lease’s poem “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” appeared in The Best American Poetry, edited by Robert Creeley and David Lehman. 

“Few poets these days are publishing verse this musically alive.”

—The Boston Phoenix

“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.”

—Kevin Killian

“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.”

—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. An exquisite collection!”

—Marjorie Perloff

“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.”

—Donald Revell