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Rating: 
Summary: This book made me miss my subway stop
Review: As soon as I took this book out of its bag, I fell into a hypnotic world of haloes, feral horses, wheelchairs, madrigals, caravans & cabbages, all coexisting magically under "The North Star hanging/Like an umlaut over all of us". The poems are remarkable, simultaneously figurative and direct. Consider this rendering of parental demise: "First, my father died. Then my mother/Did. My father died again." Or, unrequited love: "I will go on loving as I love the backs/Of things and the invisible," This is Brock-Broido at her best-inventive, sensual, profound and sobering--but not sober. She ices her cake with sly sprinklings of humor: "We were preparing to miss our President and his/Long resplendent, minky hands"
Rating:
Summary: This book made me miss my subway stop
Review: As soon as I took this book out of its bag, I fell into a hypnotic world of haloes, feral horses, wheelchairs, madrigals, caravans & cabbages, all coexisting magically under "The North Star hanging/Like an umlaut over all of us". The poems are remarkable, simultaneously figurative and direct. Consider this rendering of parental demise: "First, my father died. Then my mother/Did. My father died again." Or, unrequited love: "I will go on loving as I love the backs/Of things and the invisible," This is Brock-Broido at her best-inventive, sensual, profound and sobering--but not sober. She ices her cake with sly sprinklings of humor: "We were preparing to miss our President and his/Long resplendent, minky hands"
Rating:
Summary: great fyres of hope bot gretar frosts of feare--Wm Fowler
Review: It has been almost a decade since Lucie Brock-Broido's second book, The Master Letters, showed us the true meaning of Hunger and harrow and heartbreak, gorgeousness and glitter, "the odd marriage between hysteria & haiku." In this third collection, we glimpse again-always too briefly and exquisitely-that rare terrain, the Promised Land of (can you follow me?) oneiroticism. It is no coincidence that the cover of Trouble In Mind has zoomed in on the detail of The Dream of St. Ursula from Brock-Broido's first book: the poems in this collection are of the same world but magnified, intensified...we have the sense that we are closer than ever to Ever: "If you don't fathom that, then you should not be reading this." The whole book is apologue and aretalogy: the hero(ine) is born ("When, after many years, the raptor beak / Let loose of you // He dropped your tiny body / In the scarab-colored hollow // Of a carriage...); dies ("the halo that lit twice, // That lit and faltered, halted, lit / Once more, and then went out."); and is reborn ("numinous as a Petrarchan // Sunflower in the night"). Woven throughout is a sonnet sequence-more successful than any since at least J. D. McClatchy's "Kilim"-sung in the author's sinuous and sireny voice. The final apotheosis-in which Brock-Broido devours her past, consumes her previous lives' knowledge in a ravenous fire of a lyricism more lucid and fragrant and fractured than ever before-is devastating and profoundly beautiful.
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Summary: One Of Our Most Original, Most Compelling Modern Poets
Review: Lucie Brock-Broido is the genuine article: a writer of originality, intensity, sheer beauty. I have read her two previous books with awe and admiration. I await each new offering with joy and privilege. Trouble in Mind is her clearest, most accessible book and most moving when it deals with the death of her mother, yet all the Brock-Broido trademarks and unique gifts -- ornate, exotic language, imaginative leaps, emotional power -- are intact and flowing.
This poet gets better and better. She reminds us that poetry ought to be the mysterious, magical use of memorable language.
Rating: 
Summary: Sun promised
Review: Lucie Brock-Broido, who borrows her title from the black bluesters of the 1920s, and from the title of Alice Childress' history-making black drama of 1955 (the first Broadway play written by an African-American woman) shares with these black men and women the optimism of feeling that "the sun is gonna shine on my back door someday," even as dozens of gloomy things are called into being by the gorgeous language of her poetry. She is the mistress of Gothic suspense, which comes entangled in her enjambments like Rapunzel the thorns in her hair.There are many fine poems in this volume, itself a convincing sequel to an earlier book "The Master Letters" which borrowed from Emily Dickinson in much the same way as the present book uses troppes of blackness, suffering and negritude. One of the best is "Morgue Near Heaven," a clever kind of literary form one could call a "pre-elegy." In "Morgue Near Heaven," the elderly poet Stanley Kunitz is given his proper due while he is still with us--though very old of course, and infirm. "I've never really seen/ A death mask of his face,/ /Because, techincally, he's never been/ That way, not yet." The small chill of those final words, "not yet" is worth waiting for, and there are promises to come. "Maybe I'll inherit all the Teutonic sentences/ He knows by heart, or all the same,/ The grammar of the night, the factory/ Of slandering and fame." It's a nice tribute to a distinguished mentor. (Kunitz, of course, wrote "Father and Son" and many other poems of note.)
Rating: 
Summary: Just the icing
Review: So much talent for language here, yet the poems read like filler. Look inside yourself, Lucie Brock-Broido. Be more honest with yourself; you are so much better than this.
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