A Little Middle of the Night
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The language of Molly Brodak’s first full-length collection, A Little Middle of the Night, is ever shifting, brightly sonic, and disarming while exploring the margin between nature and art, darkness and beauty, dreams and awakenings. As echoed in one epigraph from Emerson, these poems capture “the Exact and the Vast” of consciousness in intense lyric verse with an angular and almost scientific sensitivity. Here is a speaker intent on discovery: “Oh whole world, we choose / another.”
This award-winning collection simmers with wit as Brodak confronts tragedy, childhood losses, transcendent love, and the question of art itself. Tinged with a suffering—“I was the littlest wastebasket. / I was my own church. Except— / scared, scared”—that rises above personal sorrow, her fierce and painterly poems redefine nature and art and what exists between: “Lately, there is spangled shade in my space / and a cold apple orchard to tend in place of consciousness.” As Reginald Shepherd said about the poems in Brodak’s first collection, the chapbook Instructions for a Painting, her world is “‘small enough / to sing in all directions,’ and large enough to take us there.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her Iowa prize-winning debut, Brodak unveils a ductile yet confident use of language and a penchant for formal experimentation. Stark natural description sets the dreary mood in a world haunted by a steady massacre of clouds. Her poems vacillate between hermetic and accessible, often unveiling pleasurable surprises as the fog clears: Wet licks of an animal on my ankle, oh say/ it s a good thing. Take us out of here./ War begins inside of one person, imagine that. Brodak often borrows language from writers old and new: one series includes quotes from poet Jorie Graham; there is also a Melville novel, as abridged by me ; and even a cento entitled, Joseph Conrad s Last Novel (Which is Comprised Entirely of Face Color Used in His Previous Novels) . Intertextual, funny, sharp, often elliptical yet surprisingly intimate, this is a strong debut.
