View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aPublished by NYU Press, it is the first poetry anthology dedicated exclusively to verse about Brooklyn. Editors Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Michael Tyrell have culled 135 poems that chart the boroughas long history as a place of danger and beauty, dreams and disappointment. Sure, there are several references to Brooklynas bridges and Coney Islandas beaches -- and even a few to the Dodgers -- but the book also encompasses a diversity of lives lived among and between the boroughas icons.a
--"Brooklyn Daily Eagle"

aIn the excellent and surprising anthology Broken Land, poets and editors Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Michael Tyrell take a chronological and panoramic look at the New York borough of Brooklyn as portrayed in poems.a
--"Publishers Weekly"

"This book isn't only for Brooklyn residents but for all those who value community. . . . Reading this collection is a moving experience because the poems feel home-grown. It doesn't matter where they were written, each one makes Brooklyn come alive, and the poems find a home inside you."
--From the Foreword by Hal Sirowitz, author of "Mother Said"

Brooklyn, crouching forever in the shadow of Manhattan, is perhaps best known for a certain bridge or for the world-renowned tackiness of Coney Island. When it comes to literary history, Brooklyn can also seem dwarfed by its sister borough-until you take a closer look. As unlikely as it may sound, for more than two centuries Brooklyn has inspired poets and poetry. Although there are plenty of poetry anthologies devoted to specific regions of the United States, Broken Land is the first to focus exclusively on verse that celebratesBrooklyn. And what remarkable verse it is.

Edited by poets Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Michael Tyrell, this collection of 135 notable poems reveals the many cultural, ethnic, aesthetic, and religious traditions that have accorded Brooklyn its enduring place in the American psyche. Dazzling in its selections, Broken Land offers poetry from the colonial period to the present, including contributions from the American poets most closely associated with Brooklyn-Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Marianne Moore-as well as memorable poems from Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff. Also included are a wide range of contemporary works from both established and emerging poets: Derek Walcott, Galway Kinnell, C.K. Williams, Amy Clampitt, Martin Espada, Lisa Jarnot, Marilyn Hacker, Tom Sleigh, D. Nurkse, Donna Masini, Michael S. Harper, Noelle Kocot, Joshua Beckman, and many others.

With its expansive array of poetic styles and voices, Broken Land mirrors the borough's diversity, toughness, and surprising beauty. The requirements for inclusion in this volume were simple: excellent poems that pay tribute in some way to the land that Dutch settlers, translating from the Algonquin, called "Gebroken landt." But it is the phrase emblazoned on borough billboards that best serves to entice readers into entering this book: "Welcome to Brooklyn, Like No Other Place in the World."

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aPublished by NYU Press, it is the first poetry anthology dedicated exclusively to verse about Brooklyn. Editors Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Michael Tyrell have culled 135 poems that chart the boroughas long history as a place of danger and beauty, dreams and disappointment. Sure, there are several references to Brooklynas bridges and Coney Islandas beaches -- and even a few to the Dodgers -- but the book also encompasses a diversity of lives lived among and between the boroughas icons.a
--"Brooklyn Daily Eagle"

aIn the excellent and surprising anthology Broken Land, poets and editors Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Michael Tyrell take a chronological and panoramic look at the New York borough of Brooklyn as portrayed in poems.a
--"Publishers Weekly"

"This book isn't only for Brooklyn residents but for all those who value community. . . . Reading this collection is a moving experience because the poems feel home-grown. It doesn't matter where they were written, each one makes Brooklyn come alive, and the poems find a home inside you."
--From the Foreword by Hal Sirowitz, author of "Mother Said"

Brooklyn, crouching forever in the shadow of Manhattan, is perhaps best known for a certain bridge or for the world-renowned tackiness of Coney Island. When it comes to literary history, Brooklyn can also seem dwarfed by its sister borough-until you take a closer look. As unlikely as it may sound, for more than two centuries Brooklyn has inspired poets and poetry. Although there are plenty of poetry anthologies devoted to specific regions of the United States, Broken Land is the first to focus exclusively on verse that celebratesBrooklyn. And what remarkable verse it is.

Edited by poets Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Michael Tyrell, this collection of 135 notable poems reveals the many cultural, ethnic, aesthetic, and religious traditions that have accorded Brooklyn its enduring place in the American psyche. Dazzling in its selections, Broken Land offers poetry from the colonial period to the present, including contributions from the American poets most closely associated with Brooklyn-Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Marianne Moore-as well as memorable poems from Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff. Also included are a wide range of contemporary works from both established and emerging poets: Derek Walcott, Galway Kinnell, C.K. Williams, Amy Clampitt, Martin Espada, Lisa Jarnot, Marilyn Hacker, Tom Sleigh, D. Nurkse, Donna Masini, Michael S. Harper, Noelle Kocot, Joshua Beckman, and many others.

With its expansive array of poetic styles and voices, Broken Land mirrors the borough's diversity, toughness, and surprising beauty. The requirements for inclusion in this volume were simple: excellent poems that pay tribute in some way to the land that Dutch settlers, translating from the Algonquin, called "Gebroken landt." But it is the phrase emblazoned on borough billboards that best serves to entice readers into entering this book: "Welcome to Brooklyn, Like No Other Place in the World."

The Wanted, Michael Tyrell's sharp-eyed, intellectually inventive, playful, and darkly humorous first book, is filled with so many wonderful and surprising ways of looking at familiar things that it answers Stevens' dilemma about which to prefer-"The beauty of inflections/ Or the beauty of innuendoes"-by preferring them both. Tyrell expresses this preference by way of a patient and scrupulous self-scrutiny, the kind he observes in Egon Schiele's representation of trees in which the painter "looked at himself, tore out the human, cleaved/ it into branches." So, too, Tyrell looks at himself and cleaves the essential human matter of his perceptions onto the provocative and often sinuous lines of his verse. -Michael Collier Like the haunted, disconnected heads on a wanted poster, Michael Tyrell's daring and fiercely intelligent poems signify nothing less than the mystery of existence, the relationship between how one is perceived to what one really is, if such a thing were possible to express. To read these remarkable poems is to enter the shadow world of the wanted, where every surface is vulnerable to a violence, real or implied, that will crack it open to reveal a secret code. A book of masks where the disguised often forgets it wears the mask and the mask forgets it is not the face, The Wanted invites us to "enter the wet bladed edges/ which break us again into separate beings, / pour salt into wherever we bleed." Enter with caution and be prepared to lose yourself. -Henry Israeli In Michael Tyrell's The Wanted, the images, techniques, and preoccupations of film noir permeate many of the poems. There are references to crime scenes, acts of real and imagined violence, missing children, lie detectors, forgeries, guns, exit wounds, and much more. In "The Supporting Character," the poet writes, "The narration's unreliable./...I'm a subplot about to unfold." All of this for good reason since Tyrell's subject is essentially the unfathomability of identity and selfhood-a mystery to be slowly puzzled at, unraveled, exposed. Ultimately, the poet's evasions are the evasions and uncertainties we experience in our everyday lives, both with ourselves and with other people. The Wanted is a strange, disquieting book that serious readers will keep returning to as they plumb the many levels of these resonant, mysterious poems. -Elizabeth Spires Michael Tyrell resides in Brooklyn, where he was born. His writing has appeared in Agni, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and many other magazines. With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). He teaches at New York University.