New York Times Remembers Molly Brodak

We're heartbroken to learn that poet and memoirist Molly Brodak passed away this month at the age of 39. Brodak, "a poet who chronicled the trauma she experienced as the child of a compulsive liar and bank robber in a critically acclaimed memoir, died on March 8 near her home in Atlanta," writes NYT's Daniel E. Slotnik. From there: 

Her husband, Blake Butler, said the cause was suicide and that Ms. Brodak had a history of depression dating to childhood.

Before Ms. Brodak published “Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir” in 2016, her poems appeared in publications like Granta, Guernica and Poetry and in a book, “A Little Middle of the Night” (2010), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize.

Many of her poems were spare and mysterious. One of them, “In the Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens,” reads in part:

I know there is a river somewhere,

lit, fragrant, golden mist, all that,

-

whose irrepressible birds

can’t believe their luck this morning

and every morning.

-

I let them riot

in my mind a few minutes more

before the news comes.

“Bandit,” her first published nonfiction work, was an unsparing account of her dysfunctional childhood with her father, Joseph Brodak, a tool and die worker who began robbing banks in the summer of 1994 to pay off his gambling debts. At the time, Molly was barely a teenager.

Continue at NYT.