Stay Illusion

National Book Award Finalist . Stay Illusion the much-anticipated volume of poems by Lucie Brock-Broido illuminates the broken but beautiful world she inhabits. Her poems are lit with magic and stark with truth: whether they speak from the imagined dwelling of her Abandonarium or from habitats where animals are farmed and harmed humanely or even from the surreal confines of death row they find a voice like no otherdazzling intimate startling heartbreaking. . Eddying between the theater of the lavish and the enigmatic between the gaudy and the unadorned Brock-Broidos verse scours America for material to render unflinchingly the here and now. Grandeur devolves into a comic irony: We have come to terms with our Self / Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit. She dares the unexplained: The wings were left ajar / At the altar where Ive knelt all night trembling leaning rough / As sugar raw and sweet. Each poem is a rebellious chain of words: Be good they said and so too I was / Good until I was not. Strange narratives interior and exterior make a world that is foreign and yet our own; like Dickinson Brock-Broido constructs a spider-sibling commanding the silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania. And why create the web? Because: If it is written down you cant rescind it.