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9781961897786

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o ephebes, no, you really cannot buy what a serious life of poetry (yes, precisely nothing like what you imagine) gets you. but take a long look, cause these poems are all that. joel brouwer's bourrée is so fast and so fine; do you hear the form and see the meaning? the shine off his cherries and the sparkle of his flies. yeah, he's kinda gone electric, but you are still on his old excellently-fabricked (partially antimacassared) couch, and you are still really enjoying yourself, crying. these poems will fill your room and make you want to duel. --Olena Kalytiak Davis Almost as soon as I began this book, I burst out laughing: ""The great apes fear rivers."" The seriousness of this fact, stated with such plain elegance. If you think this is funny, then this is the book for you, an amazing mixture of high and colloquial dictions woven into an electrifying blanket. Not an electric blanket, that's different. Brouwer's wordplay is gleeful, but he isn't letting us off lightly; the absurdities herein are entirely nonfictional, for we live in an absurd land of edgelords and doomscrolling teens and they are all here in As Long as We're Here. --Matthew Rohrer In these new poems, Joel Brouwer deploys his trademark deadpan humor to jackhammer the rotting foundations of our contemporary idiom. I have long turned to Brouwer, a poet whose intelligence I revere (and fear!), to be reminded of why one must write. In As Long as We're Here, I find my most persistent questions answered: how will poetry accommodate a rhetoric born of capitalism magnified and distorted by our digital age? When do 21st century platitudes (attitudes) begin to behave like mannequins brought to life, birthing their words out of our own mouths? Have we been talking to ourselves all along? Such distressing preoccupations are the mindstuff of this talky, unnerving, and riotous book. --Cate Marvin

Author Information

Joel Brouwer is the author of four earlier collections of poems: Exactly What Happened, Centuries, And So, and Off Message. He lives in Tuscaloosa and New Orleans and teaches at the University of Alabama.

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