Some Problems with Autobiography

(Hardback)

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Some Problems with Autobiography, Brian Brodeurs fourth collection, grapples with the porous and fragmentary nature of midwestern American identity in poems that range across prosodic forms and hybrid genres. By turns self-mocking, meditative, and tragi-comic, this book explores the perils of digital technologies, ecological uncertainties, and the inadequacy of language to convey our collective distress, asking how much pleasure and hardship the human heart can bear. Brodeurs narrative poems feature a dramatis personae rare in contemporary poetry, including a Syrian refugee enrolled in a writing workshop, the wife of an accused serial killer shopping defense lawyers, a horny psychoanalyst confessing a dream, and a carpenter working for the Department of Education during New York Citys first lockdown. From dramatic-monologue sonnets and narrative sestinas to discursive lyrics cast in Rubiyt stanzas and Alcaic strophes,Some Problems with Autobiographybrings ancient modes into startlingly contemporary contexts.

Author Bio

Brian Brodeur was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of three previous poetry collections, including most recentlyEvery Hour Is Late(2019) andNatural Causes(2012). Recent poems and literary criticism appear inThe Gettysburg Review,The Hopkins Review,Literary Matters,Los Angeles Review of Books,The Southern Review, andThe Writers Chronicle. Brian lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley. He teaches creative writing and American literature at Indiana University East.