This life now

“Michael Broder’s moving and lucid poems have heart, music, audacity—and they give a quiet, lasting pleasure, like an ancient Greek torso reshaped for the space age. This Life Now is full of salt, sex, TV, and other riveting varieties of poised explosiveness, to which his lucky reader blissfully surrenders.” —Wayne Koestenbaum “Dare I confess that this wise and sassy and heartbreaking collection made me scour YouTube for past episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Such are the subtle, ethereal, and playful gifts of Michael Broder’s poems that a reader won’t want to miss any allusion. No matter how bittersweet or fleeting, these poems, which span more than thirty-years of an emerging queer consciousness, chart an unflinching poetics for the missing and unaccounted for. The book makes so many foundational moments and episodes of a thriving culture reappear and cohere, with such grim acceptance and celebration, that it takes our breath away.” —Peter Covino Michael Broder holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, and a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in BLOOM, Court Green, Columbia Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Classical World, and other journals. He has taught at City University of New York (Brooklyn College, Hunter College, Queens College, York College, and the Graduate Center), Montclair State University, and The University of South Carolina. This is his first collection.