Broken Lines (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781608643349)

Death, love, and poetry-not exactly in that order. These are Sugar le Fae's concerns in Broken Lines, a retrospective of Sugar's poetry over two decades. Roughly chronological, this collection begins with a sequence of "nightstands," queer love poems, the first of which won a contest in 2005, Sugar's first publication. Over the next twenty years, Sugar has continued to publish hundreds of poems, translations, and essays in over two dozen literary publications, winning another contest in 2015 and publishing a verse memoir, The Mustard Seed (April Gloaming) in 2023.

Broken Lines's second section explores ars poetica, 'the art of poetry, ' musing on a range of poetic icons and images in the Western tradition, including Eliot's "famous clairvoyante," an elegy to a lost pen, two Latin translations, and the fantastical cats of Cleopatra, Keats, and Dickinson. Section three yields to gloomier, post-Covid realities, wrestling with time and inevitability-though not without hard, surviving zircons of hope. And like a postmodern concept album, Broken Lines even includes a few B-sides at the end, deep cuts that didn't fit anywhere else.

Line breaks are one of poetry's great innovations-structure makers / and breakers, able to stack meanings, subvert expectations, and glean music from plain language. The line-breaks in Broken Lines are no exception, sharp and clean, in turn humorous or heartbreaking. As a visual effect, Sugar's edges are restless but restrained, jagged but dynamic, seeking resonance. These poems hum on the page, crystalline and finely carved. Like a hem or highway, these broken lines lead somewhere.