The Broken Night by Bruce Arlen Wasserman
$14.99
In The Broken Night Bruce Wasserman performs the poet’s task of breaking bread with the dead. In the book’s elegant long poem, he traces his father’s life, from Abraham to Al, from anti-Semitism to dentistry on World War II’s front lines, then a full life back in mid-century America with all its pleasures and unrest. Wasserman uses rich musical pacing to weave in different historical contexts, and thus creates for us a poem that is complex, beautiful and heartbreaking—as is this entire book. It celebrates and grieves, and makes space for the reader to experience mystery and awe. “When good luck comes, the poet’s grandmother says in Yiddish, “pull up a chair for it.” This book is our good luck, so pull up a chair and read.
–Betsy Sholl, author of House of Sparrows, Otherwise Unseeable, Rough Cradle and Late Psalm
Bruce Arlen Wasserman’s poems speculate into other times and other lives with sagacity and cleareyed…optimism, we’ll call it, though they recognize the difficulties and horrors, too. His is a hard-won faith earned in the trenches and on the fences, juxtaposing the bucolic and the pop cultural and the family historical toward beauty, reconciliation, and illumination.
–Patrick Madden, Author of Disparates, Sublime Physick and Quotidiana
“The universe tilted a little to the left when I awoke,” Bruce Wasserman begins one poem, but in fact all these poems reveal the tilted universe of a unique and important vision. Here we follow the poet’s own past stretching from his father’s to his own everyday experiences made almost visionary yet firmly rooted in the real world and its language. In other words we see the personal become universal as we begin to participate in each turn of phrase which is also a turn to a new perception. “Life is a series / of patches, sometimes / held tight with glue / other times with stitches / faint traces, even / a single thread,” and the single thread here is a strong voice that is empathetic as it reaches across time in the tour de force poem, “A Loss of Terms” that climaxes this terrific book. From farm life to army life to the cosmos Wasserman takes us on a journey that is as unique as it is important.
–Richard Jackson, author of Where the Wind Come from and Broken Horizons
Description
The Broken Night
by Bruce Arlen Wasserman
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-818-6
2022
Bruce Arlen Wasserman’s writing has been published in the Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, The River Heron Review, Kindred Literary Magazine, Broad River Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, High Shelf Literary Magazine and Wild Roof Journal. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was a semi-finalist for the Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers, a semi-finalist for the Proverse Prize, won the Anna Davidson Rosenberg 2019 Poetry Award and his fiction manuscript, The Aroma of Light, was a finalist with LSU Press. He is the author of a previous collection of poetry, An Undiscovered Country. Bruce has farmed and worked as a blacksmith, driven a tractor-trailer, edited professional journals, is a dentist, studio potter, rancher and musician.
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