Joseph Lease - Pegasus Books - 11.6.07

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Joseph Lease’s third book, Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007), reflects on 21st  century America’s contradictory realities and validates poetry’s essential role in political speech. Marjorie Perloff calls Lease’s poems “as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. . . . [With] complete command of his poetic materials [Lease creates poems that are] spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority. . . . An exquisite collection!” Lease chairs the MFA Program in Writing at California College of the Arts.  His work has been chosen by Robert Creeley for The Best American Poetry and featured on NPR.