Some Problems with Autobiography

by Brian Brodeur

Overview

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. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781641773324
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	02/21/2023
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Brian Brodeur was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of three previous poetry collections, including most recently Every Hour Is Late (2019) and Natural Causes (2012). Recent poems and literary criticism appear in The Gettysburg Review, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Southern Review, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Brian lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley. He teaches creative writing and American literature at Indiana UniversityEast.   

Table of Contents

Shared Wall 1

I

Algorithm 5

Triggered 6

Barcode Ode 8

The Carpenter's Tale 9

On the Prospect of a Nuclear Exchange 12

Open Burning 13

Pessoa in the Rust Belt 14

On Mistaking a Stranger for a Dead Friend 16

Parents of Middle-Aged Children 18

To an Absence 19

Space Junk 20

Distance Learning 22

II

The Anthropocene Wing 27

The Pile 28

The Embrace 30

On Not Baptizing My Daughter 32

What We Told the Children 33

The Doll 34

Tornado Season 36

Mrs. Baumeister 38

Voicemail 41

Days of 2018 42

III

Exit Interview 51

Woman Waking Early in Late Fall 52

A Nonbeliever's Guide to Pascal's "Pensées" 54

Self-Portrait, 2085 56

Midlife 57

Paternoster 58

The Psychoanalyst's Dream 60

On Being Mistaken for a Muslim 64

On Emptying a Deceased Relative's Home 66

Corn Poppets 67

Some Problems with Autobiography 68

Primer 70