Throughout her career, she mentored multiple generations of new American poets, including Tracy K. Smith, Timothy Donnelly, Kevin Young, Mary Jo Bang, Stephanie Burt, and Max Ritvo.
Throughout her career, Greenwald was a prolific playwright, appeared on screen in the films of George A. Romero, served on the Board of Directors for the Pittsburgh Playhouse, and regularly directed plays at the City Theatre.
[8] Throughout childhood, Brock-Broido shared her mother's love for theatre, performing in local productions of plays by Jean Genet, Bertolt Brecht, and August Strindberg.
That doesn’t mean I became a poet, but I did have this absolute severance with one period of my life where I felt I was being made to live in the world I was brought into—Straight-A student, The Most Perfect Little Girl—that I couldn’t inhabit anymore.
In a 1995 interview with BOMB Magazine she would recall, I remember a time in 1979 when Richard Howard, who was my teacher at Johns Hopkins, asked us all to submit a poem in order to be admitted to his graduate workshop.
I gave him an eighty-something page poem called “Pornography,” and he handed it back to me a week later, put his monocle on, and said, “My dear, there’s not a line break in the whole 80 pages.” At which point I thought I would writhe on the train station platform where we stood.
Her poems are original, strange, often unsettling, and mostly beautiful.”[5] After graduating from Columbia in 1982, Brock Broido was awarded a year long fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
During her fellowship year, Brock-Broido lived in residency alongside fellow writers Cyrus Cassells, Alice Fulton, Cynthia Huntington, Neil McMahon, and Kate Wheeler, as she developed what would eventually become her first collection, A Hunger.
[12] In the mid 1980s Brock-Broido moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, which at the time was “the epicenter of American poetry.” During this period she befriended fellow poet Marie Howe, a relationship that would deeply impact the work of both women.
Following the success of A Hunger, Brock-Broido was appointed the Briggs-Copeland Poet in Residence at Harvard University, a position she would hold for three years until being promoted to Director of Creative Writing in 1991.
Brock-Broido’s collection uses these titular letters as a springboard, creating a lush, haunting, and intensely lyrical body of work that delves into themes of unrequited love, solitude, identity, and the act of writing itself.
The "Briefly Noted" section of The New Yorker praised the collection, writing Lucie Brock-Broido’s Fifty-two poems exploring power and powerlessness, consciousness and self-consciousness the whole phrased as an homage to Emily Dickinson.
Dickinson's nineteenth-century devices serve Brock-Broido as camoufläge for the post-Holocaust belief that in a time of total war social, racial, psychosexual, spintual coherence is either dishonest or impossible.
A Book of Mysterious Elusive Universe.”[10] After the success of collection, Brock-Broido received a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the 1996 Witter Bynner Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The "Briefly Noted" section of The New Yorker praised the collection, writing Brock-Broido populates her third volume of poems with such calamitous individuals as a Rontanov child awaiting the Russian Revolution and a transient who committed suicide by entering a lion's den at the National Zoo.
She tempers the supernatural visitations and baroque lexicon that have characterized her earlier work with an affecting skepticism, emerging from a lengthy bedside vigil with the epiphany "I made no wish, save being / Merely magical.
[15]Larissa Szporluk offered similar praise, stating "Lucie Brock-Broido’s third volume of poetry marks the return of a familiar yet altered voice—a vivacious blend of childlike lamentation, love lyric, and elegy, all spurred into expression by the death of parents, entry into middle age, frustration with the postures of art, and timeless agonies of time’s passage.
The imperious and the infantile, clasped together throughout this five-part collection, work to create a jumpy, brooding, highly charged poetry—the same poetic “animal” we encountered in A Hunger(1988) and The Master Letters (1995), only now it is brandishing a stripe.
In a review for The Scotsman, John Burnside noted In June this year, Carcanet published Soul Keeping Company, a long overdue selection of Lucie Brock-Broido's astonishing and extraordinarily powerful work.
With a tone that ranges from reverent to melancholic, Stay, Illusion delves deeply into the fragility of life and the desire to hold onto beauty and meaning, even in the face of mortality.
In a review for The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson noted: Brock-Broido’s poems, haunted by old words and meanings, full of occult spells and curses, nearly Pre-Raphaelite in their taste for gilt and gaud, have much to say to the dead.
But in Stay, Illusion the dead are disobedient in the extreme.”[18]A diverse group of poets and critics heralded Stay, Illusion as Brock-Broido’s greatest triumph, celebrating the poets “ferocity and grandeur” (Mark Doty), “gaudy wisdom” (Richard Howard), “abundance, glitter, and seductiveness” (Cynthia Macdonald), “brutally clipped sentences and brilliant timing” (Bonnie Costello), and “the most febrile imagination poetry has to offer.” (Carolyn D. Wright).