Kresge Library > Events at OU > *Molly Brodak- A Reading

Please join the Oakland University Department of English for a poetry reading by OU alumna and 2009 Iowa Poetry Prize winner, Molly Brodak. The reading will be April 1, 2010, from 3:00 to 4:30 PM in the Lake Superior Room, Oakland Center. For more information contact Cynthia Ferrera (248-370-2250; ferrera@oakland.edu). Click here to view the flyer for the event.

"Michigan-born Molly Brodak is currently a lecturer in English and humanities at Augusta State University. Her work has appeared in the Colorado Review, FIELD, Ninth Letter, the Journal, the Northwest Review, the Laurel Review, the New Orleans Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Instructions for a Painting was chosen by Reginald Shepherd for the 2007 GreenTower Press Midwest Chapbook Series. She attended the Savannah College of Art and Design and received her BA in English from Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and her MFA in creative writing from West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia." From the University of Iowa Press web site

"Molly Brodak’s poetry has a wonderful eye for the ineffable width of things—“outside is all edges-- / one window facing each other: each body / evidence of another solid space”—but it pursues a “new way of seeing,” urging upon us parallels to the mundane, the “peacocks and goats” that exist somewhere else, in memory or instant imagination, as we go through the check-out line.  The effect is to produce a kind of “in-betweeness” in the present moment, so that life is struck through with curious interventions that seem to bear on the meaning of things.  And the tone that manages these combinations is attractive in a wry and terse way that does not succumb to the temptations of irony.  The general effect is to produce a sort of careful troubling, blithe one moment and disconcerting the next, and this effect is made in a treatment of the most ordinary things—junk in a store window, a closet full of hangers—and larger, sometimes more ominous ones, like health and death, or the past, all worked at with a wistful aplomb and careful tenacity."
Professor Edward Haworth Hoeppner, Department of English

 

Brodak's award winning book: A Little Middle of the Night. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010.

more information about the book

Brodak's receipt of the Iowa Poetry Prize

OU alumna wins the 2009 Iowa Poetry Prize

Links to a few of Brodak's poems:

"After the Accident"

a few Brodak poems from the West Virginia University web site