National Book Award Finalist Stay, Illusion, the much-anticipated volume of poems by Lucie Brock-Broido, illuminates the broken but beautiful world she inhabits. Her poems are lit with magic and stark with truth: whether they speak from the imagined dwelling of her ';Abandonarium,' or from habitats where animals are farmed and harmed ';humanely,' or even from the surreal confines of death row, they find a voice like no otherdazzling, intimate, startling, heartbreaking. Eddying between the theater of the lavish and the enigmatic, between the gaudy and the unadorned, Brock-Broido's verse scours America for material to render unflinchingly the here and now. Grandeur devolves into a comic irony: ';We have come to terms with our Self / Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.' She dares the unexplained: ';The wings were left ajar / At the altar where I've knelt all night, trembling, leaning, rough / As sugar raw, and sweet.' Each poem is a rebellious chain of words: ';Be good, they said, and so too I was / Good until I was not.' Strange narratives, interior and exterior, make a world that is foreign and yet our own; like Dickinson, Brock-Broido constructs a spider-sibling, commanding the ';silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.' And why create the web? Because: ';If it is written down, you can't rescind it.'