Nick Sturm Reads Molly Brodak's Bookshelves in Issue of The Volta Dedicated to Her Memory

The Volta has dedicated its newest issue to memorializing Molly Brodak, who we lost in March. Contributions come from Blake Butler, Caroline Crew, Carrie Lorig, Gina Myers, and Nick Sturm, who considers in detail the bookshelves of a friend. An excerpt from "Molly's Books":

…An important thing about Molly’s books is that she didn’t write in the margins, leave notes, ask questions, or underline. There are absolutely no marginalia at all. Her compact, bird-like script, which she used to record recipes, write addresses, is absent. What she did is leave the smallest dog-eared pages, a few corners quietly turned down. I need to emphasize how careful, consistent, and small the dog ears are. They’re almost unnoticeable in some books. Like an accident of the pages’ proximity. There are no absent-minded, inelegant folds. In this way, they resemble Molly’s handwriting: practiced, deliberate, small. “One survival technique is to get small,” Molly writes in Bandit. Looking at the pile of Molly’s books next to me—I have absorbed this pile into my life—I’m imagining the process of making these annotations. You’d pinch the corner and gently pin your thumb while turning your index finger, slipped behind the page’s upper edge, down against the page you’re marking. I am thinking how I am never so careful in this way. Her copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson is the most annotated of her books. There are dozens of folds, so many that the thickness of the book is enlarged at the top, slightly bowing out the front and back boards. There’s a lot of Molly’s attention there. In other books, just a few folds. Only “Parisian Dream” is marked in Flowers of Evil. Only “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” and “The Last Words of My English Grandmother” in William Carlos Williams’s New Directions Selected Poems. Her copy, the 1949 edition, is a discard from Wayne State University Libraries in Detroit, where Molly is from. There are a couple of exceptions. Her copy of H.D.’s Collected Poems, 1912-1944 is marked with three purple-pink tabs. Her copy of Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s fragments, If Not, Winter, has a single blue sticky note in it. I remember pulling it from the shelf during those first few days after when every detail about every thing seemed to reflect or embody or amplify what had happened.

Brodak's most recent collection, The Cipher, won the 2019 Pleiades Press Editors Prize. Her poems, notes Sturm, have gone into her archive at Emory University's Rose Library. "Against all that, Molly’s bright refusal." Read his full reflection at The Volta.