Trouble in Mind

Trouble in Mind is the third poetry collection by Lucie Brock-Broido. The collection was published in 2004 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House Publishing. This poetry collection follows her previous collections, A Hunger and The Master Letters, and was followed by her fourth and final collection, Stay, Illusion, before her death in Spring 2018. Brock-Broido’s writing was widely celebrated and her career was successful, despite critical controversy surrounding her aesthetic; while many readers and critics admired Brock-Broido’s writing for its bizarre imaginativeness, others argued it was too abstract and inaccessible for their tastes. She received a number of prestigious awards by organizations such as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The book Trouble in Mind is written in five untitled parts, and is dedicated to Grealy, a writer who lost her jaw controversially; Grealy died due to a heroin overdose. Brock-Broido was evidently a close friend of Grealy, and so the memory of Grealy’s gruesome life and death informs the text’s overall preoccupation with mortality. The core thematic content of Trouble in Mind largely concerns life, love, aging, loss, and death. She laments the passing of her parents, friends, lovers who left her, as well as the loss of her optimism, vigor, youth, and beauty.

The poet and speaker are one and the same in these pieces, an unprecedented sense of ownership in the poetic voice when compared to the persona poems which dominated her first two works. Furthermore the poet-speaker’s grim preoccupations mark a noticeable and self-aware departure from Brock-Broido’s earlier collections which often incorporated an affinity for “magical thinking,” an opaque mind obsessed with mysticism. In “Soul Keeping Company,” the poet-speaker watches over her mother’s body, lamenting both mother and a loss of identity. “I am magical / No more,” she says. In “The One Theme of Which Everything Else Is a Variation,” Brock-Broido grieves the loss of her youth, and her sense of inner child, which she views as the source of imagination, one which constitutes a vital part of her identity and the source of her uniqueness: “If I am lucky in this life, here, I will go on / Being whole, and speak again old god, I will be plain.” This same sardonic tonal undercurrent flows in “Gamine” where the poet-speaker comments on the dire fruitlessness of worry, “even despairing relentlessly cannot / Spare you what you fear the most.”  Her sardonic poetic outlook captures her own stark outlook as a middle-aged woman who has experienced significant loss. The wry humor is this statement offers brief relief from the terror and tensions of the work’s preoccupations and serves as a tonal undercurrent.



Brock-Broido also often blends comparisons together and groups dissimilar symbols, demonstrating her preference for abstraction and surrealism; consider these lines from the opening poem “The Halo that Would Not Light”: “He dropped your tiny body / In the scarab-colored hollow // Of a carriage, left you like a finch / Wrapped in its nest of linens wound / With linden leaves in a child’s cardboard box.” Brock-Broido’s narrative delves deep beneath the experiences. The poet-speaker comments on this lack of connection, in “Still Life with Aspirin,” remarking, “objects have lost their correlative states.” Such unique techniques achieve her signature obscure and abstract style.

Brock-Broido’s writings are highly inventive and often elusive. Sometimes she sources inspiration from obscure outside sources, introducing a layering effect which connects her work to and places it in conversation with other writings. Her last collection, Dear Master, was inspired from two strange letters written by Emily Dickinson. The Notes section at the end of Trouble in Mind lists a number of various inspirations; for example, the collection’s recurring mention of a lion originates from a news article which describes one woman’s suicide by climbing into a lion’s zoo habitat. In this work, the influence of Wallace Stevens, a poet-mentor of Brock-Broido’s, is also apparent in moments of phonetic playfulness; consider the opening to “Spain,”: “The god-leash leaves / Its lashes on the broad bunched backs / Of sacrificial animals.” Several poems in Trouble in Mind take titles directly from Stevens’ notebooks.

There is a sense of recurrence--of recycling or echo--throughout the text which works to reaffirm, rearrange and rework the central content and informs its thematic core. There is no straightforward narrative; however, an array of declarative self-portraits of the aging artist arise from her autobiographical and admissive writings. The poet-speaker’s grappling with death and loss naturally accompanies her musings on her own maturing and mortality. These are sprinkled throughout the text, including, “Self-Portrait on the Grassy Knoll,” “Self-Portrait with Her Hair on Fire,” “Self Portrait as Kaspar Hauser,” “Self-Portrait in the Miraculous World, with Nimbed Ox,” “Self-Portrait with Self-Pity,” “Self Portrait as a Herd of One,” and “Self-Portrait with Her Hair Cut Off.” These poems act as anchors declaring and re-declaring the poet-speaker’s evolving identity during fragmentary contemplation and irresolution. Lucie Brock-Broido’s work Trouble in Mind follows in the footsteps of confessional voices and joins the contemporary likes of Wallace Stevens.