The broken world

The Broken World, the powerful debut of a poet of great depth and maturity, begins with narratives of individuals caught up in circumstance - a distressed girl on a Detroit overpass, a boy shooting baskets at a crisis center. By the end of the slim volume, Marcus Cafagna had led us through the postwar New York of Jewish Holocaust survivors to his native Michigan, where his marriage ended tragically with his wife's suicide, a death that has come to symbolize for Cafagna the confusion and madness of the twentieth century.