Featuring a new introduction from the author, SUPERDOOM brings together the best of Broder’s three cult out-of-print poetry collections―When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother, Meat Heart, and Scarecrone―as well as the best of her fourth collection, Last Sext.
SUPERDOOM: Selected Poems
by Melissa Broder
Tin House Books, August 2021
Embracing the sacred and the profane, often simultaneously, Broder gazes into the abyss and at the human body, with humor and heartbreak, lust and terror. Broder’s language is entirely her own, marked both by brutal strangeness and raw intimacy. At turns essayistic and surreal, bouncing between the grotesque and the transcendent, SUPERDOOM is a must-have for longtime fans and the perfect introduction to one of our most brilliant and original poets.
Melissa Broder is the author of the novel The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today and four poetry collections, including Last Sext. Her poetry has appeared in POETRY, The Iowa Review, Tin House, Guernica, and she is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry. She has written for The New York Times, Elle.com, VICE, Vogue Italia, and New York Magazine’s The Cut. She lives in Los Angeles.
Em Morales’s older sister was raped by another student after a frat party. A jury eventually found the rapist guilty on all counts—a remarkable verdict that Em felt more than a little responsible for, since she was her sister’s strongest advocate on social media during the trial. Her passion and outspokenness helped dissuade the DA from settling for a plea deal. Em’s family would have real justice. But the victory is short-lived. In a matter of minutes, justice vanishes as the judge turns the Morales family’s world upside down again by sentencing the rapist to no prison time. While her family is stunned, Em is literally sick with rage and guilt. To make matters worse, a news clip of her saying that the sentence makes her want to learn « how to use a sword » goes viral. From this low point, Em must find a new reason to go on and help her family heal, and she finds it in the unlikely form of the story of a fifteenth-century French noblewoman, Marguerite de Bressieux, who is legendary as an avenging knight for rape victims. WE ARE THE ASHES, WE ARE THE FIRE is a searing and nuanced portrait of a young woman torn between a persistent desire for revenge and a burning need for hope