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Jacque Vaught Brogan’s new collection of poems, Damage, examines a variety of cultural, natural, and personal damages in a lyrical voice ironically marked by intense beauty. This disjunction is precisely what makes the volume so disturbing and yet so tantalizing. The first section, “Windows,” examines the public sphere of failures and violence, including the simple cyclical decay of nature itself. The next section, “Blue Waters,” shifts the focus from the public to the personal, in poems frought with betrayal and desire, disillusionment and erotic bondings. In the last section, “Notes from the Body,” Brogan braids these two spheres into a strikingly original and risky series of poems which fearlessly addresses the modern emotional terrain or what might be called the genuinely “body politic.”
“These are poems that can't relax. Vivid and spare, bright and sparse, sensually alert, but not languorous—think of them as love poems in a nervous world, for even when 'love' is not their obvious subject, this book pivots around the way its practice is constantly interrupted by the sharp intrusions of everything from global warming to random murder, as though these exterior events make the building of even the human next a more precarious enterprise.” —Poetry International
Jacque Vaught Brogan is professor of English and American literature at the University of Notre Dame. She has been the featured poet in several journals, including Connotations, The E.E. Cummings Journal, and Poetry International. Other works include Stevens and Simile and Part of the Climate.