Selected by Yusef Komunyakaa
as one of five volumes published in 1996 in the National Poetry Series
"Marcus Cafagna is a poet who shies at nothing, who will
not turn away from what he sees--ordinary people struggling against, and
sometimes breaking on, the wheel of their fate. The Broken World
is a deeply humane and accomplished first book--probing, watchful, compassionate,
and necessary."
-- Edward Hirsch
"I challenge anyone to be unmoved by The Broken World. Cafagna
never gives up in these difficult, heart-rending poems." -- Jim Daniels,
editor of Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race
The Broken World, the powerful debut of a poet of great depth
and maturity, begins with narratives of individuals caught up in circumstance--a
distressed girl on a Detroit overpass, a boy shooting baskets at a crisis
center. By the end of the slim volume, Marcus Cafagna has led us
through the postwar New York of Jewish Holocaust survivors to his native
Michigan, where his marriage ended tragically with his wife's suicide,
a death that has come to symbolize for Cafagna the confusion and
madness of the twentieth century.