The language of Molly Brodak's first full-length collection, ""A Little Middle of the Night"", is ever shifting, brightly sonic, and disarming while exploring the margin between nature and art, darkness and beauty, dreams and awakenings. As echoed in one epigraph from Emerson, these poems capture 'the Exact and the Vast' of consciousness in intense lyric verse with an angular and almost scientific sensitivity. Here is a speaker intent on discovery: 'Oh whole world, we choose / another.' This award-winning collection simmers with wit as Brodak confronts tragedy, childhood losses, transcendent love, and the question of art itself. Tinged with a suffering - 'I was the littlest wastebasket. I was my own church. Except - scared, scared"" - that rises above personal sorrow, her fierce and painterly poems redefine nature and art and what exists between: 'Lately, there is spangled shade in my space / and a cold apple orchard to tend in place of consciousness'. As Reginald Shepherd said about the poems in Brodak's first collection, the chapbook ""Instructions for a Painting"", 'her world is 'small enough to sing in all directions,' and large enough to take us there'.
- ISBN13 9781587298585
- Publish Date 30 March 2010
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Iowa Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 82
- Language English