Joel Brouwer Selected Works

And So, the third poetry collection by Joel Brouwer, frames and zooms close-up on lovers and strangers as they couple and recoil. Cynical yet energetic, And So is a considered study of the ways we tell the lives we lead. With its poignant lacunae and recurring events, Brouwer offers an unstinting look at how separate our lives together are.

Joel Brouwer writes prose poems that walk a wire of anxiety through contemporary life where "you realize you're naked under your coat, you don't remember a single line, and you'll have to go on like that, you'll have to go on and sing." And yet the pieces in Centuries are so various and unpredictable and startling, sometimes hyperbolic, often sordid. "The garage smells of turpentine and dirty magazines. The freezer hums with meat. You pour yourself an insecticide martini, scratch idly at your wart, and chit-chat with a cricket." Brouwer's universe, finally, as it springs and bristles with odd, nightmarish details and human voices, is able to circle back to a place of consolation where "A body has soft and hard parts, like a piano. Music comes from where they meet." In the end, Brouwer uses the disparate contingencies of existence like an instrument through which he can control chaos through art and language.

An illusion only works if we believe that what we've just seen is exactly what happened. This collection of poems, Joel Brouwer's first, seeks to unveil the magician's trick, and expose the deceptions that we live with daily.