Quotes from Lucie Brock-Broido

Poetry is the skin that I have between my body and the world's body.

That's what interests me in poetry. That withholding, that white space, the pressure, and my long-term faith in violent concision, is still with me.

I want a poem which is made of compression, passion, precision, symmetry, & disruption.

Confession may well be a dirty word in poetry.

I came to poetry because I felt I couldn't live properly in the real world.

At the heart of my life is the idea that I don't ever want anything to ever change. That's the basic tenet.

From 'Periodic Table of Elements': A girl ago, a girlhood gone like a phial of ether | Thrown on fire--just | A little jump of flame, like grief, or | Like a penicillin that has lost its skill at killing | Off, it then is gone.

There she was, the mother of me, like a lit plinth, Heavenly, though I was reared to find this kind Of visitation impractical; she was an unbearable detail Of the supreme celestial map, Of which I had been taught that there was No such thing.

One lung, smaller, congested with rose smoke. The other, filled with a swarm of massive sentimentia.

I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost.