In on the Great Joke
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In a blend of essayistic poetics, Broadbent wields alchemy, translation and necromancy to bring readers In on the Great Joke.
What do you get when you cross Lao Tzu and an application for a university teaching application? What do you get when you give W. G. Sebald and Clarice Lispector the ability to speak from the afterlife? What happens if a girl is stopped at a red light for an entire year? In on the Great Joke is a palace of hybridity, where film structure informs poetry, poetry alters the essay, and the essay recalibrates the joke. Broadbent has lent her ear to the dead, the living, the voiceless, to give us the punchline of what it means to be intellectually alive.
‘Then there’s Laura Broadbent. She is, as are her poems, full of sultry verve and invective. Watch out. Her lines are dizzying and always on point.’
– Michael Nardone, Hobo Magazine
Praise for Oh There You Are I Can't See You Is It Raining?:
‘Oh There You Are... succeeds because it is accessible. Intellectually rigorous and evasive, it also makes itself emotionally available.’
– Justin F. Ridgeway, Broken Pencil
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Broadbent's wry, delightful collection is a high-wire act of humor and hybridized poetry forms. The broad, irreverent banter with its audience verges into near-conspiratorial tones as Broadbent flirts with but never quite commits to fourth-wall breaking. Her work is at all times self-aware, the razor-sharp precision of her language play belying its carefully crafted appearance of casual chaos. Through prose poetry, essays as explosively creative (non-)fiction, film scripts wrought into poetic usage, interlocutory legerdemain and interviews with the dead, and formal and free verse, Broadbent has crafted a book whose components collide expertly, smashed into exquisite corpses whose display is a gallery exhibition. Broadbent (Oh There You Are I Can't See You Is It Raining?) has breathtaking skill, and this collection is perhaps best described by a few words borrowed from some of the notes on her short film scripts: "The combination of these things often result in a gallows humor and absurdity that frees the ." This is a book without constraints free-wheeling, delicious absurdism. It is glorious.
