Broken World

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.

This poetry is just this side of a prayer, but fractured, laden with silence and broken message, missives cast into the void of spiritual quest and fallenness America has become under and as the redemption of capital. The self is ill, ill of itself, ill here of the collective falleness into which art falls. Rilke's cry echoes down the corridors of a juvenile deliquency and an idiocy of materiality that now reigns. Somewhere, the quest falls on ears that hear, eyes that might be renewed and see again, maybe what James Assatly stood for, was and is in his (unpublished) novel. It is as if the thousand limbs of Walt Whitman are flying off into space, conjuring the phrases of democratic redemption into worlds of disparate belonging, here freed up to reconnect, to become "Free Again" to collage into newness and to make the world new. Mingling irony and song, "Broken World" is a necessary book, a serial poem that pushes beyond Stevens, Eliot, and the modernists into another more wry land where the repressed languages and maybe the Word with the word returns to heal the hearing and to remend the language into prayer, or lamentation compounded via amalgamation, uttered carefully over the factories that close and the malls that scream enough.