Acclaimed Poet Lucie Brock-Broido Dies at 61

Lucie Brock-Broido the award-winning author of four acclaimed volumes of poetry including A Hunger (1988) and Stay, Illusion (2013) died on Tuesday at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 61.

Brock-Broido was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Awards, The Witter-Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. Her most recent volume, Stay, Illusion, was nominated for the National Book Award.

Her editor at Knopf, Deborah Garrison, shared her sadness on Brock-Broido’s passing:

Lucie was a defining presence on the Knopf list. Her poetry, while stunningly various in its forms and subjects, had its signature: injustices unmasked in beautifully embroidered, fanciful language that continually fascinated her readers and was hugely influential with students of poetry over several decades. Lucie w

as nominated for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was the winner of honors including the Witter Bynner prize for poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. No one was more dedicated to the art of poetry, students of poetry, and the people she cared about than Lucie. She will be deeply missed.

. . . . .

LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO
May 22, 1956 – March 6, 2018

That Same Vagabond Sweetness

Odd I cannot remember a time
When there was no World. I am

At home, at callow home
Worshipping the train, the Elsewhere’s

Metallic sweetness, whistling. A pack
Of blessings lights upon my back.

There art thou happy.
The noise of the world’s tracks

Made magical alarms me. There
Art thou happy too. And the half-

Blown catweed & the vagrant
Sky & the vacant apoplectic

Bed shiftless in its vacancy, I stop.

From THE MASTER LETTERS, © 1995 by Lucie Brock-Broido