Lucie Brock-Broido, _A Hunger_

INTERESTING TO SEE how much of the distinctive voice is already audible here in  the first book. The fascination with alliteration, for instance:

You, born walking on this earth, accidental

American thing, wound in this rock bed gorge,
Watched wordlessly as ice washed over
You till the world was frozen & waited

For the girl to find you there [...]

("Archaeology")

The audacity of the imagery, too, that Donne/Dickinson willingness to risk sounding mad--"A train like a silver / Russian love pill for the sick at heart passes by / My bedroom window in the night at the speed of mirage"--that's in the very first poem.

And her elegiac mood, the contemplation of things irretrievably gone ("what is lost / cannot be gotten back"), most emphatically her own childhood. The word "girl" occurs some seventeen or eighteen times, I think. "Jessica, from the Well," one of her best-known poems, certainly reads well as a free-standing piece, but in this volume it also engages with a several other poems about experiences that divide us from past selves.

There is even a poem foreseeing her own death and reincarnation, and becoming a creature famous for leaving old versions of itself behind:

I'll be a locust by then, learning in the next life how to fly transparently, how to deposit my old skins on the outside of the screened-in porch in some pastoral set in the last open space in America a hundred years from now.