“After Raphael” is the second poem in the collection Trouble in Mind. Critics praised the collection for its elegance, imagination, and range of emotion. They found Brock-Broido’s handling of loss in the poems to be honest, moving, and startling. In American Book Review, Catherine Daly had this to say about Trouble in Mind:

What is poetry? In her third slim volume, Lucie Brock-Broido continues to answer that question with decorate verse and heightened language. Brock-Broido’s poems are ars poetica—they are about poetry—but they are also about a life devoted to poetry, or a life converted into poetry, or poetry as a living, and therefore perishable, gesture.

Daly notes the influence of Wallace Stevens in this volume, adding that Brock-Broido “has used her own understanding of his poetic as the poetic in this volume of poems...