What do you get when you cross Lao Tzu and an application for a university teaching gig? What do you get when you give W. G. Sebald and Clarice Lispector the ability to speak from the afterlife? What happens if a girl is stopped at a red light for an entire year? In on the Great Joke is a palace of hybridity, where film structure informs poetry, poetry alters the essay, the essay recalibrates the joke. Broadbent has lent her ear to the dead, the living, the voiceless, to give us the punchline of what it means to be intellectually alive.

Laura Broadbent is the author of Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It Raining?, which won the 2012 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She lives in Montreal, Queceb, where she is working on her PhD in Literature.