Last Sext

by Melissa Broder

Overview

In her electric fourth collection, Melissa Broder penetrates the itch of existence and explores numberless deaths: the annihilation of self, the bereavement of love, the destruction of fantasy, the transmutation, even, of our ideas of dying.

One of the New Yorker's Books We Loved in 2016

What emerges is an infinite series of false endings—each a trap door containing the possibility for alchemy, rebirth, and renewal. Part elegy, part confessional, part battle cry, Last Sext confronts both eternal longing and the mystery of mortality, with language hot, primal, and dark, as Broder’s fans have come to love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941040348
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	06/14/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	687 KB

About the Author

Melissa Broder is the author of the novels Milk Fed and The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today, and four poetry collections, including Last Sext. Broder has written for The New York Times, Elle.com, VICE, Vogue Italia, and The Cut. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry. She lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

04/18/2016
Readers familiar with poet and essayist Broder (Scarecrone) will recognize her comfort with working in abstraction, but in her fourth collection she pushes even further into some sort of primordial nothingness. Broder leaves behind sensations of a grounded location and body even as her poems grapple with fear, want, and existential darkness. In the universe of this collection, the ocean has strange powers, and dogs—“of stars and never devils”—are the only good creatures. Many of the poems address the second person with urgent and laconic commands to abandon the self: “Wreck my temporary wrists in the white of the sun,” she writes, and “Love me with immaculate feeling zero body.” Coursing through the book is a certain obsession with the actual refuse of real bodies. In one poem Bacchus plies a pubescent girl with a “vomiting serum,” and in another the speaker remarks on the possibility of defecating time itself. None of the poems offers hope or light to anyone, yet the “I” of these poems remains obsessed with momentum, speaking with a prophetic voice mumbling from space, unable to keep from wanting more from the cooling universe. Broder’s poems offer a postmodern twist on the confessional, and they push for action in the face of despair. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"With her fourth poetry collection, Melissa Broder demonstrates just how powerful her existential musings can be. . . . Last Sext is carried by longing, fear, and the mystery of mortality - in an absolutely stunning way."

Large Hearted Boy

"Broder has a virtuosic sense of herself and is able to convey, through poetry, the form of her whole mind process. In turn, we see our deepest selves reflected back."

Daniel Lopatin

"Broder has built a career on brutally strange, introspective encounters with language. . . [Her] best poems invoke haunting repetition in an almost ballad-like incantation, allowing her lyrics to make stunning, unexpected turns of brilliance."

Booklist

"[A] provoking collection that spews and spits desperation and sensuality."

Format Magazine

"Melissa Broder is absolutely one of the most important poets writing today. Her poems eviscerate the reader with their misty and murky charm, with their ability to say what is and not what should be, for their love of life and the sensual, for their knowledge of what it is like to be a person right now. Last Sext is a master work, a text of brilliance written in a dusky field, for all of us. 'Can you feel it?' is what it asks us. And we must answer: for chrissakes, of course, yes."

Dorothea Lasky

"The poems of Melissa Broder pull off a strange and compelling trick: to exist meatily, viscerally, and even bloodily at the center of a void. Holes thump through the pages, blankness crunches bone, zeros growl with hunger. Each line is a little heartbeat hurling down the abyss."

Patricia Lockwood