And So
Joel Brouwer
Four Way Books, 2009

While there are plenty of poems which can convince the reader that the fundamental unit of poetry is the poem (or stanza, or line, if one wants to dive deeper), there aren’t many books which can convince that the book is the fundamental unit. Akin to how there are certain albums which cohere as whole albums instead of as collections of songs (nod toward the Beatles, Radiohead, the Roots, Springsteen), there are books a reader can’t help but feel that, while the poems are individually powerful, they take on new power arranged and bound together. It should be noted: books like this are exceptionally rare—I can think of maybe four off the top of my head. I’m happy to report that Joel Brouwer’s And So is one of those books, and oh dear lord, what a book.

Brouwer’s And So is one of the freshest, most enjoyable, most exciting books of poetry I’ve read in a year or so. Here is a sample, the last several lines of the book’s first poem, “A Report to an Academy”:

Except to mention Kafka’s restlessness
before his death, his trips from spa to spa
to country house to sanatorium,
and that she’s awake now, sweet with sleep sweat,
patting her belly’s taut carapace and yes
hungry as an ape but first a kiss mister
how was your trip and what have you brought us,
and that the knowledge that dooms a marriage
is the knowledge prerequisite to a marriage,
the poem has nothing further to report.

Can you feel all the ways just that little chunk of text succeeds? How Brouwer’s got the easy grace to quotelessly offer, six lines into a mega-run-on of a sentence, cutesy dialogue from a freshly awake wife? And how, along with that grace, Brouwer drops these sly toss-offs of gorgeousness while the actual emotional ordnance of the poem is not even the “point” of the poem—all these details are being reported, only as asides, as other-thans. Plus, this is just the book’s first poem.

Here’s why the whole book is this good: throughout And So, I caught at least three instances of an “empty” or “black plastic basket,” and there are at least two mentions of Crazy Horse. The phrase In Illo Tempore (Latin for at that time) shows up as a title of one poem and in the body of a later poem, separated by 55 pages. These echoes are orchestrated, architected into the text, and the result’s staggering: the book feels emotionally symmetric to a satisfying degree I haven’t encountered before in a book of poetry. Among book’s echoes: a single white hair in a comb, and attentive readers will be rewarded for bearing that phrase in mind as they read.

Lest this reviewer’s enthusiasm paint an obscuring picture: Brouwer’s And So is a terrifically sad book. In “A Chance,” the speaker is approached by a man who, his hands not working—”which frostbite or Agent Orange or who knows / what had twisted into callused mitts”—needs help reaching into his pockets. “The likeliest horrors / dropped through my mind: penis, razor blades, blood, bone, hair.” After another line and a half devoted to Worst Case Scenario stuff, the speaker suddenly drops it: “Or a key. An unlovely man / who can’t get home without a hand.”

Almost all the poems in And So are propelled by contradiction or revision, by things being first one thing and then another. In “Gravity and Grace,” the reader gets the satisfying jolt of Googling the Dom Tower of Utrecht and finding out it’s a free-standing tower, and that the cathedral it was to connect to never was built for lack of funds, though the space for the cathedral is still there, unfilled but planned-for. In “The Other Half’s Dark” the one-then-the-other aspect is more exact: a husband is out “steer[ing] the new puppy / through the cool morning,” a wife is “being told / by the orange juice carton’s cap that she is / not a winner.” And then, just more than halfway through the poem, the gutting lines: “We subsist on scattered / moments of joy and faith. Between them / our choices are patience or despair.” At the poem’s end, the husband recalls “a particular afternoon / of sex” and laughs, startling the dog. A moment later, in the tree, he notices a balloon’s rustling, and the balloon’s message will be enough to decleat most readers.

And So is positively lousy with lines that’ll have you reaching for something on which to scratch them. These are poems of intense longing (both for love and for self), intense aloneness, poems in which what’s hazard is hazard because it’s pursued—pursuit itself is risk. In an early poem, a couple is driving and their truck breaks down. They coast, and from a loading dock call and then “wait / for a tow back to what had come to pass / for normal.” There are gorgeous lines like that in this book every page you care to look. Oh, and what company’s loading dock was the couple calling from? An Eveready factory—a place where batteries are made, future fuel created, charge captured.