The Broken World

Selected by Yusef Komunyakaa

        as one of five volumes published in 1996 in the National Poetry Series

      "Marcus Cafagña is a poet who shies at nothing, who will

        not turn away from what he sees--ordinary people struggling against, and

        sometimes breaking on, the wheel of their fate. The Broken World

        is a deeply humane and accomplished first book--probing, watchful, compassionate,

        and necessary."

        -- Edward Hirsch

      "I challenge anyone to be unmoved by The Broken World. Cafagña

        never gives up in these difficult, heart-rending poems." -- Jim Daniels,

        editor of Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race

      The Broken World, the powerful debut of a poet of great depth

        and maturity, begins with narratives of individuals caught up in circumstance--a

        distressed girl on a Detroit overpass, a boy shooting baskets at a crisis

        center. By the end of the slim volume, Marcus Cafagña has led us

        through the postwar New York of Jewish Holocaust survivors to his native

        Michigan, where his marriage ended tragically with his wife's suicide,

        a death that has come to symbolize for Cafagña the confusion and

        madness of the twentieth century.