Abstract: 

Some Problems with Autobiography: Poems 

Brodeur will read a brief selection of poems from his most recent book, Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), which he completed during 2022 Faculty Sabbatical Leave and a 2022 Summer Faculty Fellowship. This book grapples with the porous and fragmentary nature of American identity in poems that range across prosodic forms and hybrid genres including dramatic monologues in sonnet form, narrative sestinas, and discursive lyrics in Rubaiyat stanzas. By turns self-mocking, meditative, and tragicomic, Some Problems with Autobiography explores the perils of digital technology, ecological uncertainties, and the inadequacy of language to convey our collective distress.

Biography: 

Brodeur is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), which won the 2022 New Criterion Prize. New poems and literary criticism appear in The Hopkins Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Criterion, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Brodeur lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley. He is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University East, where he teaches courses in American Literature and Creative Writing.