Customer Reviews

Broken World

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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.

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.

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").

I read Broken World when it was published, and recently read the book a second time. The poems are audacious, but also courageous and wise. There isn't a lot of depth and breadth American poetry right now--most are working smaller. Here's the exception. This one's for the ages.

This is work not to be missed. Part of a body of work that is significant and reveals Joseph Lease to be a major force in contemporary American literature.

A book that is not only tremendously smart and both musically and formally exquisite but also deeply, deeply humane and (yeah, I'll say it) wise. Rejoice that this kind of work is in the world. Send a copy to everyone you know.

Joseph Lease is a seminal American poet, and his astonishing first book remains a guiding light for a new generation of bewilderness'd writers. The poems which shine throughout "Broken World" are individually striking, but taken as a whole, they resonate and discharge against one another with a clarity of force rarely seen in contemporary poetics. These are impeccably heard littanies, ceaseless and luminous, charged with profound care for an imperiled world, and sung out like prayers. They crackle like radio wires and calm like an empty street--they represent, as Donald Revell keenly observed, a new way of living. Out of a cacophonic cultural web, Lease's prodigious ear pulls heartbreaking love songs, and the firework cadences that make "Broken World" so sonically brilliant doubly comment on the subject at the heart of the text--a frenetic modernity that burns so brightly it threatens to consume even itself. Managed with tender grace, Lease's book cannot be missed. It mends worlds. It is a way out of the woods.

This book was decidedly not to my taste. The way Lease approaches the Holocaust made me uncomfortable for specific reasons I cannot develop here, but which I feel need to be closely examined by readers of this book. Much of what others here evidently found moving or heart-rending, I found unsettling, sometimes grotesque, and I'm troubled the unanimous acclaim.
This review replaces an ill-considered and insensitive I have deleted, and for which I offer Mr. Lease and his readers my apologies. This replacement intends only to maintain the question about how some of the representation at work in Broken World might be interpreted, or rather, whether it may leave itself open to troubling misinterpretation. I'm confident that Lease's many sensitive readers leave my discomfort in proper perspective, since so many readers have found the book compelling; I hope this review will encourage readers to ask why the book might be problematic, and why it might be found distressing rather than moving.

Joseph Lease's Broken World is a treasure. The book is moving, musically pleasing and intellectually challenging. I believe that Lease is a visionary who brings both the pain and joy of our contemporary America to the page with compassion. This is a book to be read and re-read, taught in public schools, celebrated in literary circles and discussed widely.

Not going to go into any close reading here, just wanted to share some observations after going back to "Broken World" for the 3rd or 4th time. (Sorry in advance for my exuberant run-on sentences.) :-)

I've been following Lease's poetic enterprise since the early 90s, enthralled and exhilarated by the work's depth/breadth of scope, its sheer precision of expression--the sensuous music (by turns incantatory and surging, candidly conversational, always mellifluous) and the uncompromising craft underlying it...all of which is on impressive display here in "Broken World."

But more remarkable still, what sets this work apart for me--in the humility & doggedness of the voice, its wary but indefatigable nerve--is the inhabiting presence of a kind of...wry, self-deprecating fearlessness, one that feels distinctly Lease's. Vulnerable and divulging without being confessional, far-seeing & keen-(even gimlet-)eyed without being omniscient: audacious, but never arrogant. Whether navigating tangles of quotidian thought and language, or facing more intractable knots of perception, memory, history, the poems pulse with an abiding willingness--even a compulsion--to not turn away. As other have observed, there's a Whitman-like inclusiveness is here, refreshingly free of cynicism and posturing. But it's a Whitman for our times, using language in service of an enterprise in which language is nearly always overpowered, overwhelmed or overthrown; an effort that acknowledges, over and over, the (conjoined) impossibility and necessity of expression; and still, gathers the words anew, & speaks out again. And again.

Not simply in the echoing leitmotifs of his earlier work, but as a testament to a maturing sensibility (and poetic gifts that seem to be ever-ripening), "Broken World" also makes me keenly conscious of the larger body of work that's taking shape through these volumes of Lease--a humming, reverberating structure, building...for all the brokenness it encompasses, itself quite unbroken.

I treasure this book, and look forward to the further unfolding of Lease's uniquely captivating voice.