Serenade by Brooke Ellsworth
Serenade by Brooke Ellsworth, graduate, MFA in Creative Writing program at The New School.
Octopus Books, 2017
From the publisher: Brooke Ellsworth grabs the detritus and heartache of our age and squeezes hard. Of course a lot escapes between her fingers, it’s the poems. Sometimes they feel like elegies for people who don’t know they’re dead: “the stupidest question you get / is if you’re lonely.” You wonder whether Serenade is coming from ghosts or the newsfeed or Mina Loy or punk rock or what – you don’t always know who’s singing, or if singing’s all it is, but there’s a cut-off ear listening in the grass. -Mark Bibbins