Poetry. The third book of poetry from Joseph Lease, BROKEN WORLD divides into two sections: the first is passionate and prayer-like; the second, a single poem "Free Again," contains 26 sections, each of the same title. "Exuberant, deft, gorgeously alive, and immensely complicated, these poems recognize our human freedoms and failures in fresh and important ways. Joseph Lease is interested both in our human rights and the question of what it is to be American, and he is searingly accurate about all that word now means. BROKEN WORLD is intensely smart, exquisitely vulnerable, and completely original"--Laura Mullen. "The poems in Joseph Lease's BROKEN WORLD are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of aids or playing complex variations on Rilke's Duino Elegies (If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my / Lunch money'), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials. His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority: Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was--and how it is. An exquisite collection "--Marjorie Perloff.