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Visual Poetry Series, Pleiades Press
The Cipher
Molly Brodak’s The Cipher is a deft and unsparing study of the limits of knowledge and belief, and of what solace can be found within those limits. “We stand on the rim of the void,” Brodak writes. “We hold our little lamps of knowing / on the rim, and look in.” Drawing vividly from mathematics, Christianity, European history, urban life, and the natural world, these poems reveal a vision of contemporary experience that is at once luminous and centered on an unshakable emptiness. Wise, sharp, and sometimes devastating, The Cipher leads us through a world in which little can be trusted, takes its measure, and does not look away.
112 pages, Paperback
Published October 15, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
October 13, 2020
It is good at being nonlinear,
the afternoon.
Tongues emit selfhood.
Good at entropy,
everything.
Love kind of
thins out
if stretched. I imagine it hanging, hammered
pin thin,
between then and now.
I am not good at the truth.
It doesn't
elate me
like it does
good people.
Peace
is making space for everything:
pine boards, afternoon, deceit.
Go about a little empty
and you will be good at it.
The last submitted collection by Molly Brodak before her suicide earlier this year right before the pandemic hit. This is present, cogent, and biting contemporaneity, a collection in and of itself more worthy of the Nobel in literature than Glück because it makes more commitments, is less coy, is more willing to be caught out in the spaces where language can't reach and instead becomes gesture—though more often than not it stretches language to reach where it previously hasn't been in modern poetry. Brodak makes in even commonplace observations devastating statements of something true, but as the above excerpt demonstrates, poetic truth cannot save us so much as open us up to hurt in new ways of seeing the mess we are in. This book should be read, read again, read out loud—let it steep in your thoughts long enough and you will realize it was already there long before you had words to know it.
Pioneers,
what did you really hope
we'd do with your pain?
A coward
shakes hands with everyone he meets.
the afternoon.
Tongues emit selfhood.
Good at entropy,
everything.
Love kind of
thins out
if stretched. I imagine it hanging, hammered
pin thin,
between then and now.
I am not good at the truth.
It doesn't
elate me
like it does
good people.
Peace
is making space for everything:
pine boards, afternoon, deceit.
Go about a little empty
and you will be good at it.
The last submitted collection by Molly Brodak before her suicide earlier this year right before the pandemic hit. This is present, cogent, and biting contemporaneity, a collection in and of itself more worthy of the Nobel in literature than Glück because it makes more commitments, is less coy, is more willing to be caught out in the spaces where language can't reach and instead becomes gesture—though more often than not it stretches language to reach where it previously hasn't been in modern poetry. Brodak makes in even commonplace observations devastating statements of something true, but as the above excerpt demonstrates, poetic truth cannot save us so much as open us up to hurt in new ways of seeing the mess we are in. This book should be read, read again, read out loud—let it steep in your thoughts long enough and you will realize it was already there long before you had words to know it.
Pioneers,
what did you really hope
we'd do with your pain?
A coward
shakes hands with everyone he meets.
February 15, 2021
This book invites readers to crawl into small spaces and big spaces. Dirty our knees, speak with the improbable stewards of the living. I feel like I'm inside a great cavern in this book, and inside a crawl space. I don't feel my body at all when I read this work, which isn't to say I feel transcendent exactly, but that, on a cerebral level, I have everything I need despite the failures of earth. Molly's voice changed me, but it changed me many years ago. The poems cut through the mess of life with a cruddy diamond. It has given me more than I can say. I only wish I could thank Molly.
January 15, 2024
This took me a long time to get through. Not that I'm by any means done with it now -- the poems demand patience and reward handsomely. Molly, your mind fascinates me endlessly, I am sorry the chaos won.
March 31, 2021
This book feels like making a bed fort and reading late at night with a flashlight. Tender curiosity, shy delights, quiet observations, and some of the sharpest lines you'll ever read. The vocabulary in this collection floored me.
November 27, 2020
I loved her first collection, and I loved this one just as much.
June 14, 2024
Molly invented poetry again
July 10, 2022
I could imagine Adrianne Lenker singing all these poems. This book is so expansive. Molly Brodak wields language in a way I never thought possible. Highly recommend!
November 15, 2020
Standing on the brink of the abyss. Brings to mind Sexton and Plath. Absolutely brilliant and unforgettable. Some lines:
"Clad
in a lunatic tameness..."
"I saw the unkilled
feel for each other in the fog..."
"A group of children with beauty forced upon them, every hour,
flooded with colors and gorgeous animals and food, how they
become dull like a table covered in books. Myself I clung
to the first sad story I heard..."
"sharp mournful sun alone like a oneness, but isn't.."
I could go on and on. LOVE LOVE LOVE! Get a copy!
"Clad
in a lunatic tameness..."
"I saw the unkilled
feel for each other in the fog..."
"A group of children with beauty forced upon them, every hour,
flooded with colors and gorgeous animals and food, how they
become dull like a table covered in books. Myself I clung
to the first sad story I heard..."
"sharp mournful sun alone like a oneness, but isn't.."
I could go on and on. LOVE LOVE LOVE! Get a copy!
July 25, 2022
My first encounter with Brodak was reading her eponymous poem "Molly Brodak," which was so arresting in its clarity, straightforward language, and use of metaphor that I immediately had to know more. From there, I discovered her tragic recent death, her memoir Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir, her presence as a finalist on The Great American Baking Show, and this collection of poems. I was disappointed to find that "Molly Bradok" is not included here (and doesn't seem to be have been published anywhere), and surprised that the poems included are quite different from that one, other than the short "How Not to be a Perfectionist," which seems to be her most famous poem.
The majority of this reads, I guess appropriately so, as cipher. Storming maelstroms of words that swirl and spin, sometimes coalescing into striking ephemeral imagery but often just sweeping the reader up into a quietly chaotic thrumming. For me, these poems lived right at the farthest edge of experimental surrealism that I can appreciate. I spent a while frustrated that I couldn't discern "what the poem is about," then frustrated anew that the poems simply weren't about things in the way that most are. Maybe Brodak wanted (hoped?) readers would decode her ciphers, but I found the poems to be much more enjoyable when I gave up that way of reading entirely and just let them happen to me, like sea waves of language crashing down.
There are, however, the frequent inclusion of phrases that pierce through and pierce you with their clarity, made all the brighter and more cutting in contrast to the foggy confusion they emerge from. Some examples:
"A nonbeliever accepts a kind of fog around facts– believers demand meaning. This beloved fog forms a tissue, like love. Burns off in bald light, like love." (From "The Cipher," perhaps serving as thesis for the collection?)
"You'll never find the past. When you do find it, you'll see no one's there. Not even the you you still hope to meet." (From "Recognition")
"I am not good at the truth. It doesn't elate me like it does good people." (From "Good At It")
"Be glad if you ever meet your ugliness. Some can't. They stay at the foot of a range that only appears insufferable." (From "Inlet")
"As a thief I wasn't wasted. As a cheat I wasn't wasted. As a liar I was wasted least of all." (From "Post Glacier")
"It is true you are sometimes not yourself. That is how selves work; they hover over their borders." (From "Red")
"and I tried, I tried, I used all of myself, all of the self given to me, all of it." (from "Mount Yonah")
"Grief just sweeps through. An awareness below, a composite awareness attached to time, starving, rootless on purpose, drawing its likeness." (From "Landscape")
"and this ragged kind of love that is the only kind, only half-fitting, partly remarkable, full of everyone who made it so, everyone who ever lived." (From "Twin Bridges")
These are about a third of the lines that reached out and grabbed me, and they saved the collection for me. Interestingly, though, with other similarly experimental work, it just felt like a jumble of words. With these, however, it was like I could sense there was something palpable pulsing beneath and through them –– often grief, but also things I couldn't quite discern, save for a handful whose meaning felt closer to the surface. I'm really struck by the power of Brodak's words here, the force of presence they manage to muster against all odds, so I'm hoping that shines through a bit more perceptibly in her memoir that I plan to read.
The majority of this reads, I guess appropriately so, as cipher. Storming maelstroms of words that swirl and spin, sometimes coalescing into striking ephemeral imagery but often just sweeping the reader up into a quietly chaotic thrumming. For me, these poems lived right at the farthest edge of experimental surrealism that I can appreciate. I spent a while frustrated that I couldn't discern "what the poem is about," then frustrated anew that the poems simply weren't about things in the way that most are. Maybe Brodak wanted (hoped?) readers would decode her ciphers, but I found the poems to be much more enjoyable when I gave up that way of reading entirely and just let them happen to me, like sea waves of language crashing down.
There are, however, the frequent inclusion of phrases that pierce through and pierce you with their clarity, made all the brighter and more cutting in contrast to the foggy confusion they emerge from. Some examples:
"A nonbeliever accepts a kind of fog around facts– believers demand meaning. This beloved fog forms a tissue, like love. Burns off in bald light, like love." (From "The Cipher," perhaps serving as thesis for the collection?)
"You'll never find the past. When you do find it, you'll see no one's there. Not even the you you still hope to meet." (From "Recognition")
"I am not good at the truth. It doesn't elate me like it does good people." (From "Good At It")
"Be glad if you ever meet your ugliness. Some can't. They stay at the foot of a range that only appears insufferable." (From "Inlet")
"As a thief I wasn't wasted. As a cheat I wasn't wasted. As a liar I was wasted least of all." (From "Post Glacier")
"It is true you are sometimes not yourself. That is how selves work; they hover over their borders." (From "Red")
"and I tried, I tried, I used all of myself, all of the self given to me, all of it." (from "Mount Yonah")
"Grief just sweeps through. An awareness below, a composite awareness attached to time, starving, rootless on purpose, drawing its likeness." (From "Landscape")
"and this ragged kind of love that is the only kind, only half-fitting, partly remarkable, full of everyone who made it so, everyone who ever lived." (From "Twin Bridges")
These are about a third of the lines that reached out and grabbed me, and they saved the collection for me. Interestingly, though, with other similarly experimental work, it just felt like a jumble of words. With these, however, it was like I could sense there was something palpable pulsing beneath and through them –– often grief, but also things I couldn't quite discern, save for a handful whose meaning felt closer to the surface. I'm really struck by the power of Brodak's words here, the force of presence they manage to muster against all odds, so I'm hoping that shines through a bit more perceptibly in her memoir that I plan to read.
May 11, 2025
One of the best books of poetry I've read in the past decade, maybe ever. I love the use of biological and scientific terminology, the sadness, the struggle against the inexpressible, the struggle of existence. A truly excellent collection.
May 12, 2024
Absolutely stunning.
November 10, 2024
i <3 brodak so much . easily one of my top 5 favorite poets
March 25, 2025
This poetry is very good technically but cannot surpass the sense that it’s a suicide note, which I have no interest in reading.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews