Deeper the Tropics navigates the mythology of the self via the masked figure. These poems present the self as an accumulation of faces—or masks—over which we have only partial control. Yet it’s in this semi-public, semi-private space of self where the poems celebrate the imaginative leaps we take to find ourselves in ever-changing configurations. Operating between local and global, fantasy and history, this collection explores the self in a liminal space where simultaneities propagate.
“In Deeper the Tropics, Broaddus proves to us that the mythic can be a local phenomenon. These poems are serious play; disciplined in their letting loose, practiced in their zooming through time and space, skilled in flipping through mask and persona to attend to the multitudinous appearances of the self. The language is full of surprise and cut and Broaddus challenges those who want to limit a poet to a single register. The sublime, the surreal, the humorous, the dark, the profound, the quotidian; Broaddus is attuned to them all. And, with only the generosity afforded by the poem, offers us an opportunity to do the same. To approach the self, to know what it is, we must ‘Step into another world / with many ears to hear every song, / even the bad ones.’ Broaddus shows us how.”
—Quenton Baker
“To read Deeper the Tropics is to experience firsthand Walter Benjamin’s claim that ‘truth is not an unveiling that destroys the mystery but a revelation that does it justice.’ These poems are that revelation: through their playful and precise attention to language, they ‘jigger the fusebox’ of our minds to reveal a world perpetually making and unmaking itself, and us, too, in the process. They show us that only by crossing into the world can one ‘cross into oneself’ and that what we lose daily in doing so might be found again in language. This collection offers the reader ‘a map on the wind’—its insights are elusive yet precise and real, fleeting yet tenacious. Its looking is a kind of asking that brings the paradoxes of our terrifying and terrorizing world into a new and vivid light: history as a chimera of the present, endings sliding into origins, existence as both ‘soft and unyielding.’ Broaddus’ Deeper the Tropics doesn’t shy away from what’s difficult, but builds a kind of intimacy with it, making a space for us to breathe underwater. It is a place I return to again and again to spend time with a mind—in a mind—whose vision and voice have become indispensable to me. He is the rare poet who can make me laugh and remind me of the essential profundity that, like language itself, ‘I live in time / so I dance.’”
—Jan Verberkmoes