Melissa Broder

"Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting--until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised...

In her electric fourth collection, Melissa Broder penetrates the itch of existence and explores numberless deaths: the annihilation of self, the bereavement of love, the destruction of fantasy, the transmutation, even, of our ideas of dying. What emerges is an infinite series of false endings--each a trap door containing the possibility for alchemy, rebirth, and renewal. Part elegy, part confessional, part battle cry, Last Sext confronts both eternal...

"Superdoom: Selected Poems brings together the best of Broder's three cult out-of-print poetry collections-When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother, Meat Heart, and Scarecrone-as well as her fourth collection, Last Sext. Embracing the sacred and the profane, often simultaneously, Broder gazes into the abyss and at the human body, but with both humor and heartbreak, lust and terror. Broder's language is entirely her own, marked both by brutal strangeness...