“These are erotic, erudite, sometimes funny, punch-in-the-gut poems,
that make literary history and ekphrastic perception immediate, and turn
the neighbourly urban immediate into verbal art.”
Marilyn Hacker
“Patricia
Brody’s new collection of poetry sizzles, dazzles, and burns. Writing
with extraordinary tenderness and care, playfulness and wit, Brody’s
imagination not only illuminates our ideas about motherhood, sainthood,
beauty, and the Old Masters but also finds ways to ignite them.”
Elizabeth Mazzola English Dept Chair, CCNY
“Intricate,
richly textured, cast down on paper with an artist’s eye, Brody’s poems
take us on journeys of revelation and reckoning. Whether she’s writing
about birth, Da Vinci, Persephone, Sappho, the pandemic, or rose hips,
her poems pull us into other realms and drop us down into the subtle,
often sublime, influences of our human consciousness. With precise pen,
Brody uncovers brave truths about mothers, daughters, sons and lovers,
war, beauty, and art, taking it all in with open arms and a sheer
amazement of the world around us. Read ‘Right to Choose,’ ‘Sarah from
Below,’ ‘Wars&Mothers,’ ‘Askew,’ ‘American Venus,’ ‘All I Can Leave
You.’”
Sarah Rohrs Poet, PAD Moderator
“The winning entry,
from the outset, with its oblique title, its shape on the page and
typographic inventiveness, invites attention. Those features are far
from superfluous, but capture the photographic nature of the poem, as do
the use of line breaks... and yes the sharp and quirky language. So
many snaps of arresting detail, and every word, and space, earning its
place.”
Ruth Aylett & Beth McDonough
from their Judges’ Report
My Blazing World is PATRICIA BRODY’s second collection from Salmon Poetry. Her other books are American Desire (New Women’s Voices Award, Finishing Line, 2009) and Dangerous To Know (Salmon, 2013). Brody has an MSW (Columbia) and an MA of English Lit and Poetry (City College) where her mentors included Marilyn Hacker and Marie Ponsot. She taught English and American Literature at Boricua College in Washington Heights, and practiced as a psychotherapist for 30 years in New York City.
Brody resides on the East coast now, but lived and worked in the Bay Area way before tech, where she was an editor for Guitar Player magazine. She wrote the “first-woman-on-the-cover-story,” about guitarist-blues singer, and 2023 GRAMMY award winner, Bonnie Raitt.
Patricia now teaches an amazing group of women poets on Zoom – Seeking Your Voice: Women Writing Poetry & Memoir – which originated at Barnard College Center for Research on Women. She lives with her artist- photographer husband Tom Kostro and three vocal felines, 20 miles north of NYC. The poet’s three grown children will visit tomorrow.
Two sonnets in the new book, each called “Blue Hour,” won recent prizes from UK competitions. Brody’s poems and photographs have appeared in many print & online journals, and anthologies from Artemis , Barrow Street , BigCityLit , Bright Hills: 25 Years , Crosswinds , Glint , The Thomas Hardy Review , Levure Litteraire , Orbis , Raintown Review , Fire and Rain: Eco- Poetry of California , Junctures (NZ), Mom Egg Review , Moria , Paris Review , Western Humanities Review and others.
