Cassidy McFadzean

“I remember a professor at Iowa warning me against reading too much Lucie Brock-Broido, that the baroque exuberance of her poems might send me even further towards the esoteric and obscure. But what I think of most when I read poems like “A Girl Ago,” is Brock-Broido’s capacity to create a texture of a certain feeling of being alive: “I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost / And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia.”