Some Problems with Autobiography

By Brian Brodeur

Some Problems with Autobiography, Brian Brodeur’s fourth collection, grapples with the porous and fragmentary nature of midwestern American identity in poems that range across prosodic forms and hybrid genres. By turns self-mocking, meditative, and tragi-comic, this book explores the perils of digital technologies, ecological uncertainties, and the inadequacy of language to convey our collective distress, asking how much pleasure and hardship the human heart can bear. Brodeur’s narrative poems feature a dramatis personae rare in contemporary poetry, including a Syrian refugee enrolled in a writing workshop, the wife of an accused serial killer shopping defense lawyers, a horny psychoanalyst confessing a dream, and a carpenter working for the Department of Education during New York City’s first lockdown. From dramatic-monologue sonnets and narrative sestinas to discursive lyrics cast in Rubáiyát stanzas and Alcaic strophes, Some Problems with Autobiography brings ancient modes into startlingly contemporary contexts. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Criterion Books
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781641773331

Brian Brodeur

Brian Brodeur was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of three previous poetry collections, including most recently Every Hour Is Late (2019) and Natural Causes (2012). Recent poems and literary criticism appear in The Gettysburg Review, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Southern Review, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Brian lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley. He teaches creative writing and American literature at Indiana University East.   

Book preview

Shared Wall

Lacrimae rerum

Jarred from our half-sleeping,

we hear its muffled chorus

past words, past caring for us,

and think the sheetrock’s weeping.

Shrill sighs, like a rusty piston.

We press an ear to listen—

the burst of a yowled report

(our synapses misfiring

or the whining of old wiring)

dies down. How else to interpret

this noise that next door sings

except as the yes of things?

I

Algorithm

Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race.

—Nick Bostrom, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

I smirk until my smirking wilts to doubt—

how could I know I’m not? Knowing would be

part of the code the engineers worked out

as bits and bytes in high fidelity.

The implications sting: No you, no me.

No spouse or kids. No plot-point we’d accept

as plausible—nothing to think or see

we hadn’t been preprogrammed for except

this: if our species is an avatar

doomed not to live but only interface,

it’s not impossible this super-race

might grope through its own simulated night.

Unsure of what I glimpse in such faint light,

I squint: is that a satellite or star?

Triggered

Exodus Refugee Immigration Center

Indianapolis, Indiana, 2016

She hates living through history, she said.

She’s seen an air-to-ground attack destroy

her neighborhood while her kids brushed for bed.

She knows what shrapnel does to the human head—

she helped bury her best friend’s oldest boy

outside the breached exclusion zone they fled.

She’s closed her own son’s wounds with needle and