Damage

Jacque Vaught Brogan’s new collection of poems, Damage, examines a variety of cultural, natural, and personal damages in a lyrical voice ironically marked by intense beauty. This disjunction is precisely what makes the volume so disturbing and yet so tantalizing. The first section, “Windows,” examines the public sphere of failures and violence, including the simple cyclical decay of nature itself. The next section, “Blue Waters,” shifts the focus from the public to the personal, in poems frought with betrayal and desire, disillusionment and erotic bondings. In the last section, “Notes from the Body,” Brogan braids these two spheres into a strikingly original and risky series of poems which fearlessly addresses the modern emotional terrain or what might be called the genuinely “body politic.”