Lucie Brock-Broido’s first collection, A Hunger, was highly praised by many critics and poets. Stanley Kunitz said of it, “The poems are original, strange, often unsettling, and mostly beautiful.” His words apply with equal cogency to The Master Letters.
Her richly textured new book takes its title from the three mysterious letters left by Emily Dickinson at her death— two addressed to “Dear Master,” the third to recipient unknown. Lucie Brock-Broido’s verse-letters echo and traverse Dickinson’s wilderness of injury and worship; her language is at once blistering and mystical. These are her own brocade devastations—a tapestry of abandonment and bliss.