Joseph Lease
Joseph Lease’s critically acclaimed books of poetry include Broken World (Coffee House Press) and Human Rights (Zoland Books). His poem “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” was selected for The Best American Poetry 2002 (Scribner). His poems have also been featured on NPR and published in The AGNI 30th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, Bay Poetics, No Gender, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Fence, Paris Review, Talisman, and elsewhere.
Marjorie Perloff wrote: “The poems in Joseph Lease’s Broken World are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of AIDS or playing complex variations on Rilke’s Duino Elegies ('If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my / Lunch money'), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials. His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority: Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was—and how it is. An exquisite collection!”
Broken World was described by Michael Bérubé as “remarkably inventive and evocative work from Joseph Lease, one of the finest poets writing today.”
Ron Silliman wrote: “One test of a book is how you feel about the writer and his or her work on completing the volume. In the case of Joseph Lease’s Broken World, I want to read everything he’s ever written, and for everything that’s written but not yet in print to get published as soon as possible. Broken World is a dazzling performance whose only weakness, to my eye and ear, is that it could have been much longer.”
And Dale Smith wrote: “Lease possesses an impressive genius for compressing subversive imagery and vocal cadences within dynamic rhetorical fields . . . And it takes a poet of supreme value to manage such self-negation and control of language to bring this world out, broken or not, from the 'minute particulars' . . . Lease’s lyric will to show us what’s going on is necessary, and he shows us how to attend the ‘somatic ghost[s]’ that haunt our language and ourselves.”
The Buffalo News called Lease one of “only a handful of younger poets in each generation whose work immediately strikes us as visionary in its approach and stunning in its linguistic effect,” and added that Broken World has “inspired comparisons not only to Creeley and Charles Olson, but to John Ashbery and Susan Howe as well.”
The Boston Phoenix wrote: “Joseph Lease is making a reputation as one of the exciting young voices in American poetry. . . . Few poets these days are publishing verse this musically alive.”
And The Poetry Project Newsletter called Lease’s poetry “sublime utterance . . . [with] unique power.”
Christopher Beach wrote: “Joseph Lease is among the most accomplished and provocative poets of his generation.”
And Thomas Fink wrote: “Lease deserves to be regarded as one of our strongest contemporary political/experimental poets.” (Thomas Fink’s book A Different Sense of Power: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth Century U.S. Poetry includes extensive critical analysis of Lease’s poetry.)
Lease’s recent readings and residencies include those at the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, City Lights Books, the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, the University of Denver, Louisiana State University, West Virginia University, Sonoma State University, DePaul University, and elsewhere.
Associate Professor, Writing and Literature
Associate Professor, Writing
Chair, Writing
MFA, Brown University; PhD, Harvard University
Contact: jlease@cca.edu