About Instructions for a Painting:
"From the opening poem of her debut collection, Molly Brodak displays a gift for language that is both gorgeous and tinged with sadness: 'Leave dawn an indeterminate pink/ leave the cat with a cloud/ for a mouth.' This is a speaker a little 'owlish' and edgy, ever attentive, interested in howevers and might-have-beens and never-weres. She pushes through and on—past what is ridiculous or hurtful or both—to construct a 'weird beauty' that lies just beyond the horizon, that ever present and tantalizing 'impossible.'"
--Mary Ann Samyn
"The epigraph to Molly Brodak's chapbook reminds us how hard it is to see the new things right before our eyes. Her poems then go on to show us these new things and make us see them, and also to make us see the old things as if they too were new. In these poems, the world is 'small enough/ to sing in all directions,' and large enough to take us there. This is a verbal painting we don't want to look away from."
--Reginald Shepherd, contest judge
Read samples of Molly Brodak's poetry, first printed in The Laurel Review.
Molly Brodak is from Michigan and currently at work on an MFA at West Virginia University. Her poems have appeared in The New Orleans Review, The Laurel Review, The Journal, FIELD, and elsewhere.