Almost Here: THE BROKEN NIGHT

My latest poetry collection, THE BROKEN NIGHT, is scheduled to release from Finishing Line Press around July 15th.

Read what reviewers have said:

In The Broken Night Bruce Wasserman performs the poet’s task of breaking bread with the dead. In the book’s elegant long poem, he traces his father’s life, from Abraham to Al, from anti-Semitism to dentistry on World War II’s front lines, then a full life back in mid-century America with all its pleasures and unrest. Wasserman uses rich musical pacing to weave in different historical contexts, and thus creates for us a poem that is complex, beautiful and heartbreaking¾as is this entire book. It celebrates and grieves, and makes space for the reader to experience mystery and awe. “When good luck comes, the poet’s grandmother says in Yiddish, “pull up a chair for it.” This book is our good luck, so pull up a chair and read. ~Betsy Sholl, Author of House of Sparrows, Otherwise Unseeable, Rough Cradle and Late Psalm

Bruce Arlen Wasserman’s poems speculate into other times and other lives with sagacity and cleareyed…optimism, we’ll call it, though they recognize the difficulties and horrors, too. His is a hard-won faith earned in the trenches and on the fences, juxtaposing the bucolic and the pop cultural and the family historical toward beauty, reconciliation, and illumination. ~Patrick Madden, Author of Disparates, Sublime Physick and Quotidiana

“The universe tilted a little to the left when I awoke,” Bruce Wasserman begins one poem, but in fact all these poems reveal the tilted universe of a unique and important vision. Here we follow the poet’s own past stretching from his father’s to his own everyday experiences made almost visionary yet firmly rooted in the real world and its language. In other words we see the personal become universal as we begin to participate in each turn of phrase which is also a turn to a new perception. “Life is a series / of patches, sometimes / held tight with glue / other times with stitches / faint traces, even / a single thread,” and the single thread here is a strong voice that is empathetic as it reaches across time in the tour de force poem, “A Loss of Terms” that climaxes this terrific book. From farm life to army life to the cosmos Wasserman takes us on a journey that is as unique as it is important.~Richard Jackson, Author of Where the Wind Comes From and Broken Horizons

THE BROKEN NIGHT will be available from booksellers nationwide as well as from online retailers. Or BUY IT NOW from Finishing Line Press.

About Bruce Arlen Wasserman

Bruce Arlen Wasserman assembled his first poetry manuscript with a typewriter on the kitchen table when he was seventeen, farmed and worked as a blacksmith, drove a tractor-trailer in college, edited professional journals, wrote as a freelance journalist and is a dentist. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was a semi-finalist for the Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers, a semi-finalist for the Proverse Prize and won the Anna Davidson Rosenberg 2019 Poetry Award. He writes poetry and fiction. His book, THE BROKEN NIGHT, was published by Finishing Line Press in July, 2022. Bruce received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a literary critic for the New York Journal of Books. His writing has been published in the Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, The River Heron Review, Kindred Literary Magazine, the Broad River Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, High Shelf Literary Magazine, Wild Roof Journal and the Washington Independent Review of Books. Beyond writing, he creates visual art as a potter at Bruce Arlen Wasserman Studio, where he draws from the reservoir of poetry and his experience in working iron and wood, correlating a continued exploration of language, function and esoteric form.

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