In a blend of essayistic poetics, Broadbent wields alchemy, translation and necromancy to bring readers In on the Great Joke.

What do you get when you cross Lao Tzu and an application for a university teaching application? What do you get when you give W. G. Sebald and Clarice Lispector the ability to speak from the afterlife? What happens if a girl is stopped at a red light for an entire year? In on the Great Joke is a palace of hybridity, where film structure informs poetry, poetry alters the essay, and the essay recalibrates the joke. Broadbent has lent her ear to the dead, the living, the voiceless, to give us the punchline of what it means to be intellectually alive.

‘Then there’s Laura Broadbent. She is, as are her poems, full of sultry verve and invective. Watch out. Her lines are dizzying and always on point.’

– Michael Nardone, Hobo Magazine

Praise for Oh There You Are I Can't See You Is It Raining?:

‘Oh There You Are... succeeds because it is accessible. Intellectually rigorous and evasive, it also makes itself emotionally available.’

– Justin F. Ridgeway, Broken Pencil

Laura Broadbent is the author of Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It Raining? (Invisible), which won the 2012 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and In on the Great Joke (Coach House Books). Originally from Stratford, Ontario, she currently lives in Montreal where she is working on her PhD in Literature.

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