Joel Brouwer was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1968, and educated at Sarah Lawrence College and Syracuse University. He is the author of Off Message (2016), And So (2009), Exactly What Happened (1999), which received the Larry Levis Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University, and Centuries (2003), a National Book Critics Circle “Notable Book.” He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Chelsea, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Progressive, Tin House, Washington Post Book World and other publications. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches at the University of Alabama.
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Exactly What HappenedPoemsFrom"Abracadabra Kit"
And so with the last of my birthday cash
I ordered the Abracadabra Kit.
The ad promised rivals would flee me in terror
and pictured grownups swooning (eyes X’s)
as a boy in tails drove swords through his sister.
I checked the mailbox every day and dreamed
the damage I’d do the Knights, the magic words
I’d speak to blanket them with zits, shrivel
their cocks, cripple their families and pets.
The kit came and of course was crap.
Exactly What Happened :Poems -
Exactly What HappenedPoemsFrom"The Murdered’s House"
It can’t make much difference
to the murdered’s house
that this tenant left to the sound of sirens
instead of farewells and nostalgic songs,
that there was no room for books
or chairs in his moving van.
It can’t make much difference either
that he left before his lease was up.
Exactly What Happened :Poems -
Exactly What HappenedPoemsFrom"Chicken Truck"
Straight out of Grapes of Wrath, wrought from God
knows how many dead Fords, the chicken truck
sputters in the slow lane toward Chicago,
its teetering stacks of wire crates packed
with proto-cutlets, Kentucky-Fried-to-be.
Clouds of down and dander billow behindlike a slumber party gone haywire.
As I pass doing eighty it’s impossible
to discern birds: the swaying wall of white
is continuous as milk, unbroken
by any singular wing or beak. The hungry city
sharpens its long, unanimous knife.
A prairie gust shoves the chicken truck
smack into my lane. I veer, re-veer,
and my own sullen cargo opens its black eyes
like two empty cupboards, then closes them again.
Exactly What Happened :Poems
"Unpredictable, articulate and sad . . . Brouwer uses his deft sense of literary history to delightful effect.” —Publishers Weekly [on And So]
"Joel Brouwer's prose poems are like razor blades, sharp and flexible. It's an immense pleasure to be led by this poet's imagination, to be abruptly guided to all possible corners of our—and not only our—world." —Adam Zagajewski [on Centuries]
"There are no trick mirrors here. No hocus pocus. Brouwer's poems are beautifully exact. They are verbal sleights of hand that cause the mind to blink." —S. K. Carew [on Exactly What Happened]
Selected Works
