Refuge/es

"Juxtaposing our wars, our disturbed cities, our flawed policies with the erotic and domestic, Michael Broek creates, in Refuge/es, a stunning love song for our troubled nation and world. Consisting primarily of three sequences, this audaciously original first book is actually one complex collage with recurrent points of reference, assembled with uncommon skill and passionate care."—Martha Collins

Intimate and explorative, Refuge/es intricately weaves together political, historical, and highly specific cultural movements across many countries and time periods; challenging themes of war, violence, love, and suffering. Michael Broek counters the macro worldly lens with a microscopic view of what makes us distinctly human, which exposes a deep irony: sometimes what we run from, we also create.

The Counterpane 7

I've dreamt nightmares of wounds & made moans
so loud I woke myself bellowing.
I somehow know what is coming—everything that follows
after the first Word

is what has to follow. I am one of these
men: I hear a man in a bar say, "One"
& because he speaks I know just why I will die.
This is not because I'm proud.

I've dreamt he dapples me with whiskey
kisses then makes me sit on the Judas chair.

Tonight I'll dream a long dream of witness.

Michael Broek is the author of two chapbooks, The Logic of Yoo (Beloit Poetry Journal) and The Amputation Artist (Emerge Literary Journal). His poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Connotation Press, Drunken Boat, Exit Strata, Fourteen Hills, the Great River Review, Literary Imagination, the Literary Review, and elsewhere in print and online. He has held a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Council. He holds a PhD from the University of Essex (England) and edits the online journal Tran(s)tudies.