Overview

""You wounded me. The wounds grew wings,"" so opens The Yellow Suitcase, lines that grab you and won't let go. Poems land like a palm on the chest, tender, fierce, true. If lyric that aches and heals speaks to you, someone who loves a gut-punched poem, poems that actually do something: name pain, map it, and offer a way forward? Half-caste, tidewrack, salvors, angels, the people in these poems won't let you look away. Thunder in the veins, a barn, a suitcase set down, these poems happen with the force of weather, perfect for late-night reading and storm playlists.

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9781965784235

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Reviews

Tender as a hand on your fevered brow and sharp as rusted wire, The Yellow Suitcase is Djelloul Marbrook's book of broken selves and the small salvors who refuse to abandon them. These poems walk with illness, memory, and estrangement, but they keep finding brief, blazing mercies in the wreckage. If you reach for poetry when your own life feels fragile and frayed, this is a volume you'll hold close, reread, and quietly press into a friend's hands. The Yellow Suitcase, Djelloul Marbrook's luminous new collection, opens like a battered case on a cinder driveway and spills out tidewrack, exile, and long-ago rooms. These poems move from inlet light to hospital shadow, from childhood dust to salt-stung wind, each line a small, precise astonishment. If you crave contemporary lyric that cuts clean and glows darkly, slip inside this book and let it follow you long after you close the cover. Tired of poems that look away from the hardest truths? The Yellow Suitcase looks straight at exile, sickness, and the thin, stubborn dignity of staying alive. From the Great South Bay's wind-scoured shore to a rotting barn by the sea, Djelloul Marbrook names the wounds most of us hide and imagines the unlikely salvors who answer them. Open this collection and find language that doesn't just haunt you, it helps you reckon and, maybe, start to heal. Step into The Yellow Suitcase and follow an often marginal, never forgettable narrator who moves through cinder lots, tidal debris, and backroom miracles with a wary, watchful eye. Djelloul Marbrook's poems are crowded with vivid presences, shoreline drifters, quiet nurses, junk-drawered saints, each rendered in lyric so precise they feel like people you've known all your life. If you read poetry for voice and character, this is your next obsession: a chorus of lives you won't want to leave. In The Yellow Suitcase, every page feels storm-lit: barns creak on their foundations, thunder shoulders the horizon, and a single human voice stares down mortality with unnerving clarity. Djelloul Marbrook's poems move like weather fronts, sudden, charged, impossible to ignore, driven by the rising seas of memory and the raw fear of what's coming. Open this book when you're ready for poetry that doesn't whisper from the sidelines but kicks the door wide and demands you feel everything.

Author Information

Djelloul Marbrook was born in 1934 in Algiers, Algeria, to parents Juanita Guccione (née Rice) and Ben Aissa ben Mabrouk. Marbook's father was Algerian and he moved with only his mother to New York City when he was a young child. He was raised by his extended family, primarily by his grandmother and aunts. Marbook grew up in Brooklyn, West Islip, and Manhattan. He attended Dwight Preparatory School, and Columbia University.Marbook worked as a soda jerk, newspaper vendor, messenger, theater and nightclub concessionaire, and served in the United States Navy and as a Merchant Marine before beginning his newspaper career. Marbrook learned photography in the United States Navy and became a reporter-photographer.He was a reporter for The Providence Journal and an editor for the Elmira Star-Gazette, The Baltimore Sun, Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, The Washington Star, and Media News newspapers in northeast Ohio, and Passaic and Paterson, New Jersey. His poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in a number of journals. A publisher, mathematician, and translator, Kurt's most recent book, Halfway Between Everywhere, consists of poems, essays, and translations. Kurt founded Pierian Springs Press, an independent publishing company that engages literary and academic authors, is a CLMP, ALLi, and IBPA member. His work appears in the anthology Ricochet, AXON: Creative Explorations, Blue Mountain Review, North Dakota Review, San Antonio Review, The Lascaux Review, Red Ogre Review, etc. His forthcoming collection, Apophrades and Intrepitudes, and an science fiction novel is in progress, are both forthcoming in 2026.

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