No matter how common as part of a craft tradition in poetry, it’s always surprising to discover reincorporated fragments, lines, or stanzas from earlier drafts of a poet's work. Even as excavation, assemblage, and collage-based poetics have become standard practice, it doesn't diminish the charge of recognition, especially when exploring the undercharted territory of a contemporary author. When writers leave behind a significant body of unpublished work, it should be the duty of a dedicated readership to uncover and sort through the remaining artifacts. Powerful images often function as anchor points. The vivid description of foodstuffs in the following analysis—initially an expression of hunger in a work called “Kin XI” [1]—deepens when it reemerges in a new poem under the guise of a last supper.

Midway through Molly Brodak’s poem “Kin XI,” starving soldiers daydream about a phantasmagoric spread that includes beer, cooked boar, licorice curds, churros, jellies, hashes, mushrooms, and whipped cream. Subsisting on slivers of horse meat, the men assemble a raft and dig a pit while insects snack on their skin. The description of the imagined feast is spirited and surreal. The passage appears again in the middle of “The Babies” [2]—from Brodak’s posthumous poetry collection The Cipher—”beer to ears” is removed, and “crisp organs” are added. “Slabs” is substituted for “tables” (as in “slabs of steaming boar”). Additional edibles are appended to the second stanza—a bone-white meringue, rum, cashews, ducks, deer, herbs, and figs. Evoking Dutch still life paintings, the spectral smorgasbord is akin to Clara Peeters’ “Table with a Cloth, Salt Cellar, Gilt Tazza, Pie, Jug, Porcelain Dish with Olives, and Roast Fowl.” An ornate cornucopia casts itself into a starring role. A mouthwatering banquet is rendered as a display of the babies’ abundance.

        Brodak’s babies resemble putti. Putti—or putto—were depicted in Renaissance painting as cherubic infants—often winged—believed to have the ability to influence human lives. A rich history of putti exists in Italian art—imp-like figures who make mischief and behave in unangelic fashion—alternately known as spiritelli. In the ceiling frescoes of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, putti are symbolic of glory, ascent, and divine favor that shapes human destiny. The babies in Brodak’s poem are beatific and all-seeing—godlike with ambient grace. One of the most recognized representations of putti is from Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Two disimpassioned putti propped on elbows eye the scene from below, as Saint Barbara gazes down on them. Despite various Christian depictions of putti as representatives of purity and innocence, the putti of the poem are shaded by a sense of judgment and malevolent discrimination.

From a narrative perspective, “Kin XI” is an impressionistic poem about troops slogging through a tropical environment on a military campaign. “The Babies,” in contrast to Kin, has an altogether different point of view—the poem addresses the reader directly, establishing a link with the author as a subject of the babies’ scorn. Past transgressions and sins are easily unmasked by the omniscient putti. Latent hostility is palpable, and the power dynamic is clear. A sense of impending expulsion looms: a reckoning with a higher authority. Even as judgment predominates, the babies retain their gentle nature, “stir[ring] their tender feet in the air / through pastel clouds of peace.” Tension builds as the cherubs “glow down on us/ from their pink swings / with no munificence.” Brooding beneath the poem’s surface are both awe and contempt, inspired by the babies’ poise and cold-eyed assessment. Implications of exclusivity form, with the poet and her reader circumscribed to ostracism. Reflecting the state of the outsiders in “Kin XI” are “naked animals, black / everywhere.”

Throughout the initial Kin poem [3], past history holds sway in a new land, despite attempts to forget and begin anew. Exiled pioneers, “the flesh of the story, the actual men, / come to sow their bottomless delusion.” Past fragments unfold into the future, reappropriated into The Cipher. In cryptography, a cipher is a system in which symbols, or groups of symbols, are rearranged through a series of transformations, converting plaintext to ciphertext. Though even concealment is futile under the babies’ reign, “undo[ing] every compressed layer / of your careless life.”

While The Babies is about rejection from a kind of paradise, “Kin XI” occurs in an infernal junglescape, birds “whoop[ing] in the black canopy / endless but heavenless.” Brodak salvages the imagined banquet from “Kin XI” and repositions it in a cloud-lined heavenscape—glittering with “jellies sheened like gold” and “footed dishes of bluish whipped cream / sweet as day.” Beautifully described nutriment that fails to bring deliverance, and, in context, only inspires ache—unobtainable bounty in an illusory domain.

        In light of Brodak’s biography, the turn at The Babies’ climax is stunning: “They notice everything. / Your small cut and the void behind. / They have voted us out of their world.”

Brodak ultimately failed to find a publisher for the collection of Kin poems. As stated by her husband, Blake Butler:

“She simply no longer fit anywhere, she'd come to believe, having failed to find a publisher for any of her last three book-length manuscripts—Comedie (2012–2013), Hologram (2013–2015), and Kin (2015–2016)—each rejected numerous times over, to the point that Molly’s early confidence after her first book’s publication [A Little Middle of the Night] had all but disappeared.” [4]

Similar to the horses caught in the swamp “under their doomed crap” from “Kin XI,” the reader is likewise relegated to a quicksand shift of fate, voted out by a divine congress—banished from The Babies’ world.






Works Cited

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[1] Molly Brodak, “Kin XI.” Powder Keg Magazine, December 2014. https://www.powderkegmagazine.com/molly-brodak

[2] Molly Brodak. “The Babies,” in The Cipher (Warrensburg: Pleiades Press, 2020), 8-9.

[3] Molly Brodak, “Kin.” Two Serious Ladies, https://www.twoseriousladies.org/3-poems-by-molly-brodak

[4] Blake Butler, Molly (New York: Archway Editions, 2023), 153.