Broken Night

Broken Night is a poetry collection by Bruce Arlen Wasserman that looks closely at things that are obscure or overlooked. Many of the poems are imagined conversations with the dead, along with portraits of the living, all aimed at drawing out the lively core of each word.

The centerpiece is a long poem of about twenty pages, divided into thirteen parts, whose musical pacing carries it through different historical periods. Around it are shorter poems on a wide range of subjects: delivering a breech calf by moonlight in rural Minnesota, the lives of chickens in factory farms and what that system costs them, a 1934 Farmall tractor seen through a reflective lens, an elegy prompted by drifting snowflakes, dental work performed under canvas at the front during wartime, and the Yiddish sayings of the author's grandmother, applied to everyday life.

Wasserman, a literary critic for the New York Journal of Books, holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His poems have appeared in the Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, The River Heron Review, Kindred Literary Magazine, Broad River Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, High Shelf Literary Magazine, Wild Roof Journal and the Washington Independent Review of Books. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was a semi-finalist for the Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers and for the Proverse Prize, and won the Anna Davidson Rosenberg 2019 Poetry Award.

The poems range from farm life and army life to the cosmos, moving between the familiar and the far-reaching.