When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother
Poetry. Who's the queen of kundalini bloopers, Emily Dickinson's attitude problem (that bitch) and California dreams? It's Melissa Broder, who will charm your pants off and show you a little tough love in this vivid, witty first collection of poems. Each poem is artisan-crafted in controlled couplets, weighty triplets, tight syllabics and assonance that will take the top of your head off. But you won't have the time to absorb the academic monkeyshine—so absorbed you'll be on the flip side of...
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\ Publishers WeeklyThis debut from Broder, editor of the online poetry magazine La Petit Zine, and a publicist at Penguin, is as funny and hip as it is disturbing. Poems with titles like “Where Is Your Vampire” and “Not Quite Ready for the NRA” feature jumpy, accessible lines about love and lust in a drug- and media-fueled world. “You’re nobody,” Broder only half-sarcastically proclaims, “ ’til some sweet-faced junkie/ with a Dixie cup of juice// and methadone loves you/ more than his drugs.” These poems are also quirkily compassionate (“Faith is a muscle// like the rotator cuff./ After the matinee// she saved soiled tissues—/roses in her coat—//remember that sadness won’t make you explode”), sexy, and at times even gross: “I’m wearing sunglasses// in the supermarket,/ mourning follicular fallout,/ getting pus on all the towels.” Throughout, Broder searches for a place to stand, and for an object for her considerable sympathies. This is a bright and unusual debut. (Feb.)\ \
