Broom La scopa [Paperback]

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. English to Italian translation by Irene Marchegiani and Emanuele Pettener. Reading Joelle Biele's masterful second book, BROOM, I am ruptured into spring—alive, alive, oh, and in love with the sheer exuberance of the poems' lyric intensity. BROOM is a book to fly away on, bewitched by shifting rhythms and the incantatory surge of a music rare in today's poetry. These are fast-moving poems, one perception immediately leading to a further perception. There's a marvelous nervosity to BROOM, a rush radiating the high energy discharge of a whole field of gorse or BROOM in flower, 'this morning's minion' of dazzle and shine—for the ear as well as the eye. —Susan Mitchell

What is more intimate than a parent's correspondence with a child? In BROOM, Joelle Biele gives us poems that chronicle the first years of two of her children, poems equally tender and candid, secured by the rigors of their formal designs and the watchful hand and eye of the mother. The domestic narrative, however, Biele adds a further poetic trope, creating in BROOM a king of parental sublime. Precarious life and the proximity of harm, or simply the million smaller terrors witnessed by any watchful parent, are part of the larger beautiful scene of the extended family unit. Sometimes things are so fraught 'we must look away'; sometimes we fall where 'the tide swallows everything whole'; yet sometimes, like a 'floating angel,' we may strike that particular balance, ravishing if temporary, where we 'hover... weightless,' suspended in the moment of 'what it is to be present while still here on earth.' BROOM is a gift that awaits Biele's children, but it is ours to discover and relish right now. —David Baker