This poem begins with something Brenda Hillman said in a Zoom event during the pandemic about becoming a writer. “Religious refusal to engage critically” is a comment a science professor I know makes on her students’ papers—and is maybe also the thing I most fear in people of faith, myself included.
Kelsi Vanada on "Leaderboard" |
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Lloyd Wallace on Matt Broaddus' Deeper the Tropics
"This poem, like many poems in the collection, concerns itself—to steal a phrase from Robert Hass—with time and its materials: all the little objects and actions that dress the set of one’s time in an often repetitive world. These repetitions are Broaddus’ key material—the repetitions built into an individual life, such as having the same breakfast from the same grocery store supplied by the same corporations that squeeze eggs out of the same dead-eyed chickens every day. There are also those larger repetitions that continue to be enforced by the state: 'I go into the mist tonight. Another black man is dead.' Throughout the book, Broaddus never stops pointing to the strange, the awful, and even the glorious ways our lives, and the so-called separate segments of human history, continue to overlap."
via CLEVELAND REVIEW OF BOOKS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Nathan Spoon on Life in Public
"I hoped for this poem to expand beyond the realm of the scholarly, outward in a serious way relating to societal circumstances we are in together at present—and by societal I mean the global society of human beings sharing a planet, one tragically in a vortex of cascading concerns including war, surging debt and inflation, climate crisis, resource depletion and the crossing of planetary boundaries, growing inequality, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, and the backsliding of democracy.” |
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