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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In other words, February 13, 2011
This review is from: Broken World (Paperback)
Through folding and unfolding of the world, so that such action might expose the problems of our daily lives and how our indifference is a contributing factor, Lease moves through the poetry and poetics of the past to effect a new poetry--a poetry that is astonishingly arresting, that is as beautiful as it is interested in beauty, that is as reflective, critical, and revelatory of our times as it is equally hopeful of them. Thus, it's less than insightful to approach Broken World by applying fashionable theory to the book and to focus solely on the language games of the past, and in so doing claim that Lease has yet to move beyond the preoccupations of our most celebrated experimental American poets, by reason that what's at heart here is an ethics, enacted on the page, is an aesthetics, embodied by page that echoes/co-articulates Glissant who, in Poetic Intention, reminds us: "Our necessity today: to affirm, not one community facing another, but in relation to another." It's this being in relation to another that Broken World invites us to consider so beautifully.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of our best American writers, September 22, 2007
This review is from: Broken World (Paperback)
I've just seen Joseph Lease visit Buffalo, NY, and read from Broken World. I already knew what a terrific book this is. But I'm now more convinced than ever that Lease is one of our best American writers. One particular means of working, which he's worked into a signature technique, is the long poem made of separate prose & poem fragments. Broken World closes with such a long poem, the beautiful "Free Again." Such works as this operate like wonderfully refractive novellas that show you both the world at large and where you are standing today, this very minute. Lease is politically topical (& not in a doctrinaire way) and effortless in the way he gives detailed glimpses into lives that strike one as real, yet rarely if ever registered in writing. I had a class of 1st year students at this reading and they too were taken -- Lease is that rare poet who works at both the forefront of what's going on in his art and can communicate with novices. Buy this book -- simple as that.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Soul-making": Joseph Lease's Broken World, February 15, 2011
This review is from: Broken World (Paperback)
Joseph Lease's Broken World is an immensely important continuation of Walt Whitman's investigation of America as a communal project in Leaves of Grass. It meditates on shattering losses and attempts to mark accountability as it considers the ways Whitman's vision has been undercut by corporate greed and self-serving consumerism: "America equals ghost. The wrong side of history" ("Broken World"). Facing the increasing danger of becoming cold, desensitized, and self-absorbed, Lease attends to "Soul-making" and renewal by reaching out to other voices as poems like "Free Again" consider the means by which "the effacement of history can be avoided and combated" by bridging gaps of meaning to explore layers of anger, guilt, isolation, and community compounded in American consciousness (Fink, A Different Sense of Power 112). Often this is accomplished via Lease's "`leaping' among various aesthetics and developing collagistic juxtapositions that build brief narratives and articulate social critique" (111-112). Locating and re-locating "common ground," Lease is able to give voice to Whitman's assertion that "there are millions of suns left," and as clutter becomes "holy garbage," Broken World realizes that the project of America is equal parts beauty and devastation ("Free Again"). Most importantly, Lease finds that there is a compulsive need to believe and to "[sing] hymns for no reason"--hymns that go "and, and, and, and, and--I, I, I, I, I,--" at equal intervals ("Free Again").
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