{"product_id":"stay-illusion-isbn-9780307962034","title":"Stay, Illusion","description":"\u003cb\u003eNational Book Award Finalist \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eStay, Illusion\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 other—dazzling, intimate, startling, heartbreaking. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEddying between the theater of the lavish and the enigmatic, between the gaudy and the unadorned, Brock-Broido’s 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 I’ve 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 can’t rescind it.”\u003cp\u003eLUCIE BROCK-BROIDO is the author of three previous collections of poetry, \u003ci\u003eA Hunger\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Master Letters\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eTrouble in Mind\u003c\/i\u003e. She is Director of Poetry in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and has been the recipient of awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYou Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously To This World\u003cbr\u003e   \u003cbr\u003e Tell the truth I told me                       When I couldn’t speak. \u003cbr\u003eSorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship            Or a child \u003cbr\u003eWho rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer\u003cbr\u003e In the 1930s                                    Toward the iron lung of polio. \u003cbr\u003eAccording to the census I am unmarried                                    And unchurched.\u003cbr\u003e The woman in the field dressed only in the sun. \u003cbr\u003eToo far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful \u003cbr\u003eBlubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of ice.\u003cbr\u003e I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible. \u003cbr\u003eFor whom left am I first?\u003cbr\u003e We have come to terms with our Self\u003cbr\u003eLike a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e   \u003cbr\u003e Dove, Interrupted \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Don’t do that when you’re dead like this, I said, \u003cbr\u003eArguably still squabbling about the word inarguably.\u003cbr\u003e I haunt Versailles, poring through the markets of the medieval. \u003cbr\u003eMostly meat to be sold there. Mutton hangs\u003cbr\u003e Like laundry pinkened on its line.\u003cbr\u003eAnd gold! —a chalice with a cure for living in it. \u003cbr\u003eWe step over the skirt of an Elizabeth.\u003cbr\u003e Red grapes, a delicacy, each peeled for us—each sheath \u003cbr\u003e The vestment of a miniature priest, disrobed.\u003cbr\u003eA sister is an Old World sparrow placed in a satin shoe.\u003cbr\u003eThe weakling’s saddle is worn down from just too much sad attitude. \u003cbr\u003eNo one wants to face the “opaque reality” of herself.\u003cbr\u003e For the life of me. \u003cbr\u003eI was made American. You must consider this.\u003cbr\u003e Whatever suffering is insufferable is punishable by perishable.\u003cbr\u003eIn Vienne, the rabbit Maurice is at home in the family cage. \u003cbr\u003eI ache for him, his boredom and his solitude.\u003cbr\u003e On suffering and animals, inarguably, they do.\u003cbr\u003e I miss your heart, my heart.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor A Snow Leopard in October\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStay, little ounce, here in \u003cbr\u003e Fleece and leaf with me, in the evermore\u003cbr\u003e Where swans trembled in the lake around our bed of hay and morning\u003cbr\u003e Came each morning like a felt cloak billowing\u003cbr\u003e Across the most pale day. It was the color of a steeple disappearing\u003cbr\u003e In an old Venetian sky. Or of a saint tamping the grenadine\u003cbr\u003e Of his heavy robes before the Blessing of the Animals.\u003cbr\u003e I’ve heard tell of men who brought Great Pyrenees, a borzoi, or\u003cbr\u003e Some pocket mice, baskets of mourning doves beneath their wicker lids, \u003cbr\u003e A chameleon on a leash from the Prussian circuses,\u003cbr\u003e And from the farthest Caucasus, some tundra wolves in pairs.\u003cbr\u003e In a meadow I had fallen\u003cbr\u003e As deep in sleep as a trilobite in the red clay of the centuries.\u003cbr\u003e Even now, just down our winding road, I can hear the children blanketing\u003cbr\u003e Themselves to sleep in leaves from maple trees.\u003cbr\u003e No bad dreams will come to them I know\u003cbr\u003e Because once, in the gone-ago, I was a lynx as well, safe as a tiger-iris\u003cbr\u003e In its silt on the banks of the Euphrates,  as you were. Would they take\u003cbr\u003e You now from me, like Leonardo’s sleeve disappearing in\u003cbr\u003e The air. And when I woke I could not wake\u003cbr\u003e You, little sphinx, I could not keep you here with me. Anywhere, I could not bear to let you go. Stay here\u003cbr\u003e In our clouded bed of wind and timothy with me.\u003cbr\u003e Lie here with me in snow.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300447473893,"sku":"NP9780307962034","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307962034.jpg?v=1767737287","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/stay-illusion-isbn-9780307962034","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}