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.