“Brian Brodeur’s formal skill, his feel for the whole history beneath a sentence, a line, a syllable, is matched here only by his unsentimental compassion for the people he renders in his poems. I can think of few other poets who capture what contemporary American life actually feels, looks, and sounds like as movingly as Brodeur does. Poems such as ‘Cousins,’ ‘Local Fauna,’ and ‘The Register’ will be with us for a long time indeed. Brian Brodeur is a marvel.” —Peter Campion

“Brian Brodeur’s formal skill, his feel for the whole history beneath a sentence, a line, a syllable, is matched here only by his unsentimental compassion for the people he renders in his poems. I can think of few other poets who capture what contemporary American life actually feels, looks, and sounds like as movingly as Brodeur does. Poems such as ‘Cousins,’ ‘Local Fauna,’ and ‘The Register’ will be with us for a long time indeed. Brian Brodeur is a marvel.” —Peter Campion

Some Problems with Autobiography, Brian Brodeur’s 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. Brodeur’s 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 City’s first lockdown. From dramatic-monologue sonnets and narrative sestinas to discursive lyrics cast in Rubáiyát stanzas and Alcaic strophes, Some Problems with Autobiography brings ancient modes into startlingly contemporary contexts. 

“Brian Brodeur’s formal skill, his feel for the whole history beneath a sentence, a line, a syllable, is matched here only by his unsentimental compassion for the people he renders in his poems. I can think of few other poets who capture what contemporary American life actually feels, looks, and sounds like as movingly as Brodeur does. Poems such as ‘Cousins,’ ‘Local Fauna,’ and ‘The Register’ will be with us for a long time indeed. Brian Brodeur is a marvel.” —Peter Campion

“Brian Brodeur’s formal skill, his feel for the whole history beneath a sentence, a line, a syllable, is matched here only by his unsentimental compassion for the people he renders in his poems. I can think of few other poets who capture what contemporary American life actually feels, looks, and sounds like as movingly as Brodeur does. Poems such as ‘Cousins,’ ‘Local Fauna,’ and ‘The Register’ will be with us for a long time indeed. Brian Brodeur is a marvel.” —Peter Campion

Some Problems with Autobiography, Brian Brodeur’s 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. Brodeur’s 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 City’s first lockdown. From dramatic-monologue sonnets and narrative sestinas to discursive lyrics cast in Rubáiyát stanzas and Alcaic strophes, Some Problems with Autobiography brings ancient modes into startlingly contemporary contexts.